thanks to everyone.
I have been reading and trying to figure this out for a few weeks now, read the AdSense TOS, and I am at a loss, hopefully some of you with more experience can lend a hand.
This is in regards to domain parking. <Snip - No specific domains, please, per TOS and Charter>
Immediately you can see a few things that are wrong in my opinion. First, there is no "good" content on this page, it is sans meta tags, keywords, or anything that would ever help an end user. The page is one big huge trick to get a user to land on it, and click on a link which will make that domain money.
At no point, has any work gone into making a page with relevant data on it, for AdSense to parse and show relevant ads, which I thought was the entire premise of AdSense.
Those issues aside, they are given more luxuries, such as being able to fully customize the results that AdSense shows back, they have added css styling to the page results, and altered the url, as you can see, in the url above, the url is that of the domain <is parked>. Sure, if you click on it, after a few redirects, you can see it passes through google and finally to the advertiser, but that is in 100% violation of the TOS.
Further, the results are highly targeted by simply altering the 'keyword' parameter, again, no need to write valid and good content, just twiddle your url,<snip>
Notice the last part of that url, just change it to anything you want. <snip>
You get highly targeted ads back, with no effort. I can build a system that auto generates pages like this in a few hundred lines of code, stick some css templates on top of that, and I have what they have, but doing so, I break all the rules of the AdSense TOS.
Now, this could all be a part of <snip> AdSense for domains, but I have never seen any API or spec that shows how I can get the same features. Why do other large companies get a free ride on this, and us users do not.
I wanted to start a legit site, where I was going to take an inordinate amount of time to hand write valid content for the domain(s), and even link to 3rd party sites in which I would make no money for that click. But I was going to be giving back to the search users a site that had at the very least, some use to them. Sure, there would be some ads on the page, and I would hope they may click on them.
I have heard of sites getting shut out of AdSense just for putting "support our sponsors" and here we have "sponsored results" and the google logo has been removed. Someone, google employee or not, care to explain the raionale behind this, as it does not seem justified to those out there who would like to compete in this market, and compete in what I would say a much more ethical manor.
[edited by: Webwork at 10:33 pm (utc) on April 26, 2007]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
You will find plenty of company in commiseration, and lots of posts on the topic.
You won't find any response from Google reps.
Someone selling widgets may not be able to register buywidgets.com because it's prohibitively expensive, but they can advertise on it. Good targeted traffic.
Where is the evil in targeted search traffic? ;)
And this one lone page that isn't in the index is ranking in the top ten for a relatively competitive seasonally targeted keyword phrase, and there's a whole network of a kazillion cloaked pages like that floating around. No sign of being parked, it isn't on a "domain parking" server, it's on a server belonging to the outfit that owns them, which is "tied in" so to speak with a whole conglomerate.
Some folks out there might consider that evil, even if those cloaked pages are considered part of search traffic. :)
[edited by: Marcia at 6:50 am (utc) on April 27, 2007]
