According to the web giant, the move is designed to protect users from malware hosted on bulk subdomain services.
Oliver Fisher, a member of Google's anti-malware team, said that, over the last few months, the service’s systems have detected a number of bulk subdomain providers becoming targets of abuse by malware distributors.
"Bulk subdomain providers register a domain name, like example.com, and then sell subdomains of this domain name, like subdomain.example.com. Subdomains are often registered by the thousands at one time and are used to distribute malware and fake anti-virus products on the web", he said in an earlier security posting,
In some cases, he added, Google's malware scanners have found more than 50,000 malware domains from a single bulk provider.
According to the Heisse online newswire, the co.cc subdomain is owned by a Korean company and offers 2 domains for free and bulk registration of 15,000 domains for $1,000.
"According to its own statistics, co.cc hosts over eleven million domains. Google has not announced its removal of co.cc, but Matt Cutts, head of the Google's webspam team, wrote that, although there were a lot of high quality freehosting services out there, `if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole'.", says the newswire.
Commenting on the removal of co.cc from Google, Phil Lieberman, president of Lieberman Software, said that the move is a positive step in the battle against malware, but added that more sub-domains also need chopping,
Co.cc, he said, is one of the relatively new generation of sub-domains assigned to a company, which has offered free domain registrations for several years.
"Predictably, this has resulted in large volumes of spammers and other low grade registrants flocking to its doors", he explained.
Lieberman went on to say that co.cc is only one of several `spammy' domain name groups that are causing problems for internet users. The big question, he noted, is whether Google has the chutzpah to ban other sub-domains that generate vast volumes of electronic garbage on the internet.
"Just because a company has acquired the rights to a given dub-domain does not give it a right to be on the mainstream search engines. The delisting of co.cc is a step in the right direction by Google and we applaud that move", he said.
"The next step will be for Google to take action on the many other sub-domains that should not be listed in its search directory", he added.