Forum Moderators: martinibuster
When will Google finally extend the 200 domains filter. I can't fight this .info crap any more with this limitation.
At least those dumb MFAs owners identify themselves with .info so it's not time consuming to find them.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 2:38 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2007]
I really think it makes Google look bad when they allow their ads on parked domains. I have, personally, talked with Google on the phone about this and they swear that it is good for the advertisers...I, respectfully, disagree.
If you want a bit of deeper insight into domain parking I've gone into some detail.
If you want a bit of deeper insight into domain parking I've gone into some detail.
Could someone please explain, why does Google allow parked domain owners to purchase adwords ads? I thought Google is about quality, but not in this case.
This way they mislead their visitors big time.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 9:06 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
a moral issue
I've contributed heavily to the capital fund responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure of the WWW, paying far more than my fair share for maintaining the WWW traffic system so that others don't have to.
Don't you know that the cost of domain names goes towards paying for maintaining and upgrading the zone files and root/zone servers, extending the reach of the WWW, making certain the WWW is up, working and available 24/7/365 world wide, upgrading the basic operational software of the WWW and making certain the WWW is administered day in and day out, competently?
How much have your contributed to the operational costs of the WWW lately? I'll bet not much.
The way I see it, buying domains and paying annual renewals pending their development is a moral imperative. Even more virtuous is parking domains. Heaven forbid all the parked domains are suddenly developed. Then the WWW will be overwhelmed by all the bot traffic, the extra TCP/IP requests will swamp the DNS system, ISPs will have to charge more for the heavier bandwidth useage associated with delivering developed webpages to people's homes (versus light Kb domain parking pages), and the WWW will go to heck in a handbasket.
Shame on your for not buying more domains and parking them.
Freeloader! Developer! Stressing the poor the DNS system! Leaving to others to bear the burden of the expense of ICANN!
;-P
[edited by: Webwork at 11:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
I've contributed heavily to the capital fund responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure of the WWW, paying far more than my fair share for maintaining the WWW traffic system so that others don't have to.Don't you know that the cost of domain names goes towards paying for maintaining and upgrading the zone files and root/zone servers, extending the reach of the WWW, making certain the WWW is up, working and available 24/7/365 world wide, upgrading the basic operational software of the WWW and making certain the WWW is administered day in and day out, competently?
How much have your contributed to the operational costs of the WWW lately? I'll bet not much.
The way I see it, buying domains and paying annual renewals pending their development is a moral imperative. Even more virtuous is parking domains. Heaven forbid all the parked domains are suddenly developed. Then the WWW will be overwhelmed by all the bot traffic, the extra TCP/IP requests will swamp the DNS system, ISPs will have to charge more for the heavier bandwidth useage associated with delivering developed webpages to people's homes (versus light Kb domain parking pages), and the WWW will go to heck in a handbasket.
Shame on your for not buying more domains and parking them.
Freeloader! Developer! Stressing the poor the DNS system! Leaving to others to bear the burden of the expense of ICANN!
[edited by: Atomic at 11:33 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
I've contributed heavily to the capital fund responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure of the WWW, paying far more than my fair share for maintaining the WWW traffic system so that others don't have to.
LOL. Yeah, and Al Gore invented the internet
Shame on your for not buying more domains and parking them.
I've got well over 100 domains - possibly 200. I'm afraid to count. But I always viewed it as more of a weakness than a contribution. I've got way more ideas than I have the time to develop them.
Atomic:
I hope you intended this as a joke.
I'm pretty sure Webwork's post was tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise he wouldn't have ended it with:
;-P
I'm pretty sure Webwork's post was tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise he wouldn't have ended it with:;-P
[edited by: Atomic at 11:43 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
That being said, I'm not making any judgement of AdSense on parked domains, either way. It's just not worth my time.
Question is, why are parked domains purchasing Adwords ads? The only reason I can think of is arbitrage.
[google.com...]
However, the Program Policies does make a reference to the quality of content: "AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines posted at [google.com...]
And that document refers to another page that states "There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site."
[google.com...]
So in a roundabout way, AdSense on a parked page is technically against the Policy, but not directly. So what it all comes down to is one single line in the AdSense Terms of Service:
"Google reserves the right to refuse participation to any applicant or participant at any time in its sole discretion."
Likewise, they can allow participation, if that's what they want to do.
Some of my domains I intend to develop some day, some I bought as an investment (I just sold one today for $750 that I purchased for $6.50 less than three months ago) and some will probably stay parked indefinitely.
Cluttering up the SERPS? Maybe. But I've seen plenty of hosted websites that I consider a lot more worthless than any of mine, so it's all relative.
I think you miss the point entirely that by allowing ads on parked domains, Google is encouraging people to do as you have done. You see no problem with it, but others do.
Every time someone introduces right/wrong/evil/bad/good/wicked/etc into a thread ("is google evil? is parking wrong? is cloaking bad? is buying links unethical?" and son on) it muddies the whole issue. Discussions that assume free-market philosophy are so much more interesting than lectures about how to behave.
Discussions that assume free-market philosophy are so much more interesting than lectures about how to behave.
Are you serious?
As for parked domains themselves, well, they just sit there like billboards. In fact, they are billboards. Are billboards ugly? Yep. Are they unethical? Not at all. If you owned that block of land with a billboard on it, could you build a beautiful house? I'm sure you could.
You completely darted around the issue of building the billboard with stolen money.
Are parked domains really allowed to advertise with Adwords?
It's a topic that deserves scrutiny and discussion. On the other hand, the ethics of domain parking has been flogged to death, and is not interesting at all.
I hate adwords ads that go to parked pages too. However, there seems to be some kind of market anomaly that's making it possible
And I think this market anomaly is coming from the fact that Google needs to keep their advertising bubble inflated for as long as possible. Their last crackdown was for Adwords>Adsense arbitrageurs - i.e. an obvious inflation of their revenues.
Why do they let Adwords>Parked arbitrage happening? Easy: they do not see this as "inflation" of their revenue as the money is coming "from the outside", i.e. in their (distorted) view it is "fresh" money to the system.
If they would remove further advertisers (those who advertise parked domains that offer ZERO value to the customer) Adsense would probably come to a halt. There seem to be too few genuine advertisers for those millions of sites running Adsense. In other words: the whole advertising market would deflate and shrink to its real size. Ad prices would collapse, possibly tearing down the ad prices for Google search as well (if content would be so much cheaper, people would stop their search campaigns).
To me, Google has one obvious problem: their inhouse sales force is so lame that they are unable to capture those genuine advertisers who buy ads to show on parked pages with other companies. Right now, the genuine advertisers money is split between:
- the provider of the "sponsored links" (e.g. YPN)
- the provider of the "parking page" (e.g. parked.com)
- the domainer
- Google
- the Adsense publisher
and my feeling is that the Adsense publisher is carrying the burden of the whole chain, i.e. he gives away visitors for 2 cents where it could be (and should be) 20 cents.
The money of the genuine advertisers should be spent with Google directly, leaving out YPN, the parking provider, and the domainer. Three parties less to the system. Sounds good, eh? The winners in this scenario: the advertiser (saves money for exactly the same traffic), Google (gets more money from exactly the same traffic), and the publisher (gets more money from exactly the same traffic).
If I were an advertiser shelling out, like, $0.60 per click to YPN to end up on a PARKED page with cheap traffic sources (namely, from Adsense), I would immediately pull my campaign and spend my money directly with Google. But Google sales force is apparently incapable of delivering this message to advertisers. They can't sell.
So, what would happen if Google would ban Adwords>Parked ads? (It's not a technical issue. If *I* can spot them, Google certainly can.)
1) Up to 50% of the ads were gone (depending on site and niche).
2) The traffic to the domainers would be seriously hurt, probably also by up to 50%. Many amateur/semi-professional domainers might give up the game. A lot of domains would be available on the market again. The web would be less polluted.
3) Google revenue would also take a hit, but the click traffic from the parked pages would be gone, too, rendering the campaigns with those who provide "sponsored links" (e.g. YPN) useless. As a reaction, advertisers might migrate to Google directly IF THEY WANT TO GET THAT TRAFFIC. It's the same traffic anyway, just cheaper. Of course, advertising revenue with Yahoo! would falter, and they would get yet another shot by the analysts.
4) The web would be a cleaner place.
There might be other reasons why Google allows Adwords>Parked arbitrage. Maybe they have figured out that with this scam they at least can keep their SERPs clean? Domainers that can live off Adwords>Parked arbitrage may not focus on beating the SERPs? The price is high, but given Google's market dominance in search, maybe this is a strategic issue?
Are parked domains really allowed to advertise with Adwords?
IMO, yes, but their low Quality Score should mean that they are not competitive with ads for sites with high quality content.
From Quality Score support page [adwords.google.com...]
Quality Score is used to calculate minimum bids and assign ad position.
From the Adwords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines [adwords.google.com...]
If the landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results that will result in a lower Quality Score.
So why are ads for parked domains viable since they obviously have low QS and have to share the payout with the domain parking companies?
[edited by: Leonard0 at 7:53 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2007]
The only reason I can think of is that Google simply does not apply their quality score on parked domains because parked domains generate huge amounts of $$$, so they forget about quality.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 8:37 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2007]
www.example1.com
www.example2.com
www.example3.com
www.example9999999999.com
and on and on because someone has the good names parked, like www.Example.com, and have not the desire to better the net or society but are simply "fishing for clickers". Essentially, Google (and the other advertising companies that allow that garbage) is helping flood the net and making it a miserable place to try and find stuff at times (unless you click on the ads of course). I'm really hoping that Google considers the full ramifications if the parked pages are allowed to continue hosting ads. I mean think of it, what if some guy wants to make a really cool site that could greatly help society but gives up after he finds out every domain that would be good for him is parked with nothing but a list of ads on it. I am SURE this frustrates many people. As a matter of fact, EVERYONE I know hates those parked pages. I sure hope they come out with more domain extensions soon, LOL..., .poo .goo .par .cra .gar where will it end?
If the landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results that will result in a lower Quality Score.So why are ads for parked domains viable since they obviously have low QS and have to share the payout with the domain parking companies?
CTR (as a part of "performance") is included in the content network ad appearance and position Quality Score. Arbitrageurs are able to use clever targeting of cheaper keywords, compelling or sometimes deceptive ad copy, and the resulting high CTRs to overcome their low quality landing pages and achieve higher ad positions and improve their chances of appearing on the content network. Also, there are unspecified "Other relevance factors" in the formula and the possibility that this and other QS formulas are not universal or uniform for all types and sizes of advertisers.
The only reason I can think of is that Google simply does not apply their quality score on parked domains
If quality score works so well, how come they had to ban all those MFA arbitrage sites to get them out of the system? If QS worked it would have priced them out.
If quality score works so well, how come they had to ban all those MFA arbitrage sites to get them out of the system? If QS worked it would have priced them out.
Yeah. I think some de-mystification of Google is urgently needed. Really. Urgently.
Possibly the market anomaly is a lack of regulatory control over false advertising.
Does anyone here remember when the FTC stepped in to 'deal with' (read: address) the issue of false/misleading/deceptive trade of advertising by search engines making their sponsored links look like search results?
Parked domains I see almost always have "search results" that are sponsored links. Fraud.
And one of the big firms for parked domains uses a page title that says "example.com: The Leading Widget Site on the Net." More fraud.
The initial position of the FTC, if memory serves, was that only Google's policy/practice was acceptable.
But now? There are all kinds of deceptive advertising online and the FTC is silent. Many of the Google ads appearing on my sites are deceptive. But I hit the 200 limit filter long ago.
It's really a wacked-out situation with little hope for the future. The government won't deal with it. Google won't police it. Publishers can't really police it. And the advertisers won't police themselves.
If Google want to be purists with their Competitive Ad Filter, they should give us a Fraud Filter. If the Google standard Don't Be Evil still exists, it has to allow us to stop others from being evil with their false advertising.
p/g
