Parked Domains are Malls for Invalid clicks

Ban parked domain advertising

[conjo_guam]

Unfortunately google makes ton of money from parked domain advertising. Much of invalid clicks may come from misspelt domains, type-in traffic etc. There is a chance where group of people may form a ring and click on other's parked domains.

One solution to reduce invalid clicks is to remove publishers who have zero content and 100% Advertisements. Also one more popular advertising format is to have the top fold of the page filled with ads with content at the bottom (which is not visible untill you scroll down). This should also be banned.

Best regards
conjo

[RockSolidWes]

I don't think an all sweeping ban on this traffic is needed. First of all, what does not work for you may work for others. Some of my best traffic comes from parked domains and sites with three ad units.

What works best is to provide content on your own site, more than what the user expects, so they stay on your site longer and then create links to funnel them into a purchase or lead. In order to do this you need an analytics program loaded with features. (Google Analytics works very well).

Tip: Add keywords that always appear on 'parked domains' to your negative keyword list. The content network takes into account your negative keywords. Some examples on the top of my head:

-buy this domain
-domain for sale
-sedo
-domain may be for sale
-domain names for sale
-domain parking
-domain auction
-godaddy
-godaddy.com

[boplicity]

I don't know about you...but the traffic I get from parked domains is very profitable, invalid clicks or not.

[wildbest]

There is a chance where group of people may form a ring and click on other's parked domains.

This is valid for all AdSense content network ads. People can form a ring and click on others AdSense ads. Do you think all AdSense content network advertising should be banned?

[venrooy]

Those of you that make a profit from parked domains - do you make your profit from actually selling items? Or do you make your profit from advertisisng - ppc etc?

[mr2828]

I think actually hitwise or some other company released a report regarding the conversion ratios of various sources of traffic, and direct navigation traffic from people typing in domains into their browsers, hitting parked pages, and then clicking ads was the highest converting traffic, something like over 4% conversion on average. It was double the normal search engine conversion rate.

If you think about it it makes sense - if someone is going to the trouble of both typing in a relevant domain like widgets.com and then secondly clicking an ad for that kind of product, then they definitely are interested in buying.

But I guess there is a wide variation of domains, not all are so well targetted to running specific commercial ads.

[mr2828]

I would like to add, that it's clear now Google is using their data gathered from their conversion system to help track invalid clicks, and you can be sure that if direct nav traffic was horrible then they would be either dropping those partners supplying that traffic or they would be radically reducing the payouts. It hasn't happened, so I tend to believe this traffic isn't that bad.

[jay5r]

What might make sense is for Google to separate it out as a separate service which advertisers can choose to advertise in or not. Then they could set up the ability to target misspellings of the advertiser's domain name or product, as well as have topic-based advertising.