Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Some of them are selling their own in house ads, but plenty are straight up MFA sites with zero content. One site profiled in the article <snip> has serious Adsense TOS violations. They have snipped up the Adsense code to display a column of 10 Adsense ads. The guy who runs the site is standing there with his picture in Business 2.0, raking cash by abusing Adsense and taking money that should go to real content providers.
What say you ASA?
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:41 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]
This system would be a lot easier to live with since it would be more honest by identifying ads on domains as a different type of ad.
Well I'm beginning to think the best way to make money from Google is to buy up domains for key phrases and run ads on them. Not only will you enjoy type-in traffic, but also get decent placement in the SERPs. Seems like an easy transition for scrapers. Just remove scraped content from current sites and run advertising only with a pat on the back from G.
Google encourages this behavior and a general lowering of the bar of content quality across the entire web.
Wow! This looks like fun since I got back from the pub!
Whilst I appreciate everyone's stance about this issue, the fact is that the Adsense job "ought to be" delivering the correct ads to the relevant parked domains and the "customers" who happen to arrive there.
If they accomplish that then they have achieved their objective and their Adworders target, it's as simple as that.
Because you consider it is harming you, and it does affect me, does not mean it is a "BAD" advertising medium for the Adworders.
The Adworders can block these sites if they feel the need to do so.
<snip>
These are actual googlesyndication ads.
[edited by: btas2 at 2:25 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:21 pm (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics. [/edit]
Well I'm beginning to think the best way to make money from Google is to buy up domains for key phrases and run ads on them. Not only will you enjoy type-in traffic, but also get decent placement in the SERPs. Seems like an easy transition for scrapers. Just remove scraped content from current sites and run advertising only with a pat on the back from G.
To get accepted in the DomainPark program you need 750,000 pageviews a month. To achieve this you will likely need thousands of these domains.
The Adworders can block these sites if they feel the need to do so.
The lack of transparency make smart pricing difficult to have faith in. I would rather just see the ads gone from domains altogether.
Sure, and why not pull AdSense ads from gmail, too? Come to think of it, why not dump every site in the AdSense network that doesn't convert well for advertisers? If that happened, smart pricing wouldn't be necessary.
Ain't gonna happen, though. AdSense is a market-dominating, lowest-common-denominator, advertiser-take-potluck network. Google can't redefine it at this late date. On the other hand, Google can (and quite possibly will) introduce product extensions or subsets of the network to stay competitive and to attract a wider range of advertisers.
The Adworders can block these sites if they feel the need to do so.
No you can't. Not when they are included in "Search Network".
Content Network, yes. Search Network, no. There are parked domains in Search Network.
The only choice you have is to opt-out of Search Network. But AOL and Ask Jeeves go out the window with that.
As long as Google is honest about what they do I couldn't care less about product extensions. It's the dishonesty that has me all riled up and with good reason.
What is Google doing which is dishonest?
Advertising is advertising is advertising...
You don't like it, I don't like it, HOWEVER the fact is that these domain sitters have spent serious money to buy these domain names. They're not free, they have to pay their dues.
Do not be jealous of them simply because they are doing what you have not done or did not consider as a business model.
The day that Google/YPN/MSN/whomsoever stops paying them will be the day you can have their domain names.
We all want to have the most prestigious, trade/publicly recognisable name at the top of the tree, reality is that most of shop in the Dollar/Pound store.
It serves a market segment, if you want to go for it, do it.
I stand by my claim of dishonesty.
I'm interested in green widgets? Dang! GreenWidgets.com has links to manufacturers and wholesalers and retailers of green widgets! Who woulda thunk! I wonder what I might find in the SERPs if I type "green widgets" into the search box? Oh, I see, lots of scrapers and SEO stuff and a study from GreenWidgetU about the migratory pattern of widgets. :)
As the owners of domains invest more money and effort in producing landers - or websites or microsites - populated with on domain topic information and links, the model and the benefit to visitors will improve. Therefore it is likely that the practice of direct navigation will increase, not decrease, as the model improves. Trust me: there is plenty of incentive to improve the model.
Better to be the PPC company (search engine) that supports the model of direct navigation than the one that ignores it. After all, direct navigation is search and I'll bet everyone here has employed the method many more times than once.
I think what you're missing is that type-in traffic IS a form of search. Indeed many would argue that it is the most direct form of search.
What about parked domains that are misspelled versions of actual domains? Suppose someone tells me about example.com and I want to go there and buy a widget. But I type in examplle.com because of a typo or ignorance. I end up on examplle.com and see lots of ads for competitors of example.com.
Isn't that a form of deception with AdSense as a participant?
FarmBoy
Typos of generic words, that lead to landers populated with links to websites on topic for the topic of the correctly spelled generic word, are likely a no harm / no foul situation.
Typos of famous marks are currently on the outs at most PPC domain parking firms. That's a sound practice as a lawyer might argue that not only the typosquatting domain but also the feed provider are profiting from the trademark violation. (Note: Not all uses of a famous mark or trademark constitute an infringement. PPC likely does.)
OTOH, the person who really really wanted to visit Example.com I imagine would quickly correct their typing error. At least that's what I do when I mis-type. That doesn't stop me from typing navigation, any more than turning down the wrong street stops me from driving.
FWIW, I don't do typos of any kind, at least not intentionally, though going forward I might register a few typos of my own domains. :)
(Drat! Someone has already done that!)
Just as aside: I once allowed a typo of a location - pretty long 2 word location - that I registered by mistake to drop. Bad move. At the drop catching auction the domain was acquired for $2,500. Thus goes my education. What I failed to appreciate was just how many people made the same mistake and how much real estate sold for in that locationn. AND there wasn't a website at either URL, only landers. Soooooo, no harm, no foul? Ouch! :(
Here is the problem as I see it. Parked domains show up in the SERPs of all SEs. They displace content sites which have to advertise on parked domain sites to get the same traffic they might normally get if a parked domain was not indexed and being a conduit do funnel traffic and pick up click revenue.
Why is Google indexing parked domains? Money. What information on a parked domain needs to be organized for general search? None or almost none. All this does is add an extra paying click between the user and the information they are after. It builds millions of indexable billboards into the index so people will pay for traffic that they could get straight from the SERPs if the parked domains weren't there.
I think the Adwords forum should be more concerned than the Adsense forum because it's the people in there who are paying for it, since Google spams it's own index with MFAs.
<snip>
Adwords users are paying good money to be displayed on pages with this gibberish.
How does this make webmasters feel who have worked hard on content sites that display Adsense ads?
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:38 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
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Most haven't learned the impressive potential that the internet has to offer. It is crucial that you exercise patience when striving to acquire answers to your questions. The correct way to track down this information is to exploit all resources at your disposal. While the internet continues to store up gobbledegook in adverts websites, we'll try to organize them to you.
There are MFA sites in nearly every niche but most rank so low you have to dig deep in the serps to find them. Any half way decent webmaster with a quality content site should easily be able to outrank them.
Here's a true example. I do picks on football games on my site. I checked with G beforehand and was approved and even include a dislaimer and there are no additional gaming site ads.
When the college bowl season came along, there were 32 games spread over 3 weeks, so I created five pages, spearated by dates and did the picks as time allowed. I put the basic info in for each game - the teams, line, location, bowl title but nothing else until I actually did the analysis and made my selectios (3-6 concise paragraphs)
As time progressed, I noticed lots of extra clicks and good revenue. Why? People were going for the picks and clicking on those pages that were not yet complete. Finding little info, they either clicked back or on an ad. It paid to offer less than useful information, so in essence, Google promotes illiteracy, stupidity, laziness, sloth, and the decline of Western civilization (to say nothing of what they're doing elsewhere in the world).
It's a really horrible system and won't last more than a few more years without radical redesign. The fact that scrapers, spammers and domain parkers make more than honest publishers with AdSense proves my point.
Added: By the way, I'm very good at handicapping sports. I was 6 for 8 in the big bowl games including tonight's win by Texas for the national championship.
Adwords users are paying good money to be displayed on pages with this gibberish.
Well, I for one have been getting great conversion rates from these parked domain sites through my AdWords campaigns. I'm sure I'm not the only one either. So maybe it doesn't work for everyone, but it works for some--at least it does for me. I agree that Google should give more refined control over where your AdWords ads appear though.
However, as for the parked domains appearing in the SERPs, of course they will! You don't think the guys who are doing this are buying domain names that didn't already have links and traffic do you? These guys are smart: they buy up domains that have been allowed to expire but that still have inbound links and traffic. It takes quite some time before G/Y/M come back around and crawl the sites again to put them in their proper place in the index. In the meantime the parked domains are raking in the cash. Seems pretty clear to me.
Go to any domainer site and ask for an appraisal for any hyphenated domain.
"Reg Fee"
"worthless"
Why would somebody register thousands of hyphenated domain names and park them? Where is the traffic coming from?
Has to be either:
- Paid advertising, most likely in violation of the ad network's TOS
- Spam placed on message boards, blogs, etc.
