Google has some sort of internal flag for determining origin is different on some platforms. We don't get a complete takedown of Neocities every time there's a spam site reported. It is likely that they were not on that list but perhaps have been manually added to whatever that internal list is at this point.

The public suffix list (https://publicsuffix.org/) is good and if I were to start from scratch I would do it that way (with a different root domain) but it's not absolutely required, the search engines can and do make exceptions that don't just exclusively use the PSL, but you'll hit a few bumps in the road before that gets established.

Ultimately Google needs to have a search engine that isn't full of crap, so moving user content to a root domain on the PSL that is infested with phishing attacks isn't going to save you. You need to do prolific and active moderation to root out this activity or you'll just be right back on their shit list. Google could certainly improve this process by providing better tooling (a safe browsing report/response API would be extremely helpful) but ultimately the burdon is on platforms to weed out malicious activity and prevent it from happening, and it's a 24/7 job.

BTW the PSL is a great example of the XKCD "one critical person doing thankless unpaid work" comic, unless that has changed in recent years. I am a strong advocate of having the PSL management become an annual fee driven structure (https://groups.google.com/g/publicsuffix-discuss/c/xJZHBlyqq...), the maintainer deserves compensation for his work and requiring the fee will allow the many abandoned domains on the list to drop off of it.

If you're not using separate domains then I hope you don't have any kind of sensitive information stored in cookies. You can't rely on the path restrictions for cookies because it's easily bypassed.

You can set cookies that strictly stay on the root domain and don't cross to subdomain origins, and vise versa (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Coo...). We've been doing this for 12 years without issue.

Strict cookies crossing root to subdomains would be a major security bug in browsers. It's always been a (valid) theoretical concern but it's never happened on a large scale to the point I've had to address it. There is likely regression testing on all the major browsers that will catch a situation where this happens.