Those fake link pages.

brought to you by Google

[Eurydice]

You've seen those pages that are nothing but ads: no content, just ads. Well, it turns out Google is behind many of those.

[washingtonpost.com...]

[ganderla]

This is old news. They have been involved in domain parking ads for well over a year now.

That program is for people who have tons of domains that get type-in traffic but no development on the domain.

[jimbeetle]

Hmmm, the fact that it hit the mainstream press in a somewhat negatively-slanted article is quite interesting.

[toddb]

I love that they have "ads by google" at the bottom of the page.

[larryhatch]

As long as they don't say "Your clicks support this site" they might get by. -Larry

[Green_Grass]

I though pages with nothing but links were the hated MFA's... Is G behind most of them?

What A Shock ..... :-)

[Atomic]

I think that the more people are aware of this the less likely it is that they will advertise. I think this is going to come back to bite Google on the ass. How could front page articles detailing this issue possibly be a good thing for Google? I bet that a lot of people who are currently in the content network reconsider spending there. It was Google's choice to ruin the content network now they are going to have to deal with the fallout.

There will be people that will never trust Google again and will look elsewhere.

[jtara]

I hope this article wakes up the big corporations mentioned in the article who are being ripped-off by Google. Action on their part provides some hope for the little guy.

[JollyK]

I love that they have "ads by google" at the bottom of the page.

What's even funnier is that the ads by Google are for "Trademark Attorneys" and "#1 Domain names." (Or were when I looked.)

That about made me spew my coffee onto the monitor.

JK

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I don't like the smell of this domain-parking stuff either, and wish G would police it better and hold their nose(s) less tightly when letting participants sign up.

But with care (eg plenty of negative keywords and explicit exclusion of any site that you notice is sending you totally-non-converting junk) the final CPA (cost per action/conversion) can be just as good as the other G outlets, and the volume much higher.

Rgds

Damon