Adverts appearing on Parked Pages

...time to stop allowing them?

[norton j radstock]

Something that has bothered me for a while is the question of why Google allows Ads to appear on parked domains. It seems to me that it represents the opposite of what Google says it is trying to achieve in terms of raising quality on the internet.

Users arrive on such pages by following an outdated link, or by accident, and are presented with nothing but adverts on a page with no content. Worse, it has brought about a whole parasitic industry of people trying to snap up expired domains, and then replace the previous content with something of no intrinsic value.

I wonder if the ultimate conclusion is for website owners to remove their own content, 'park' their websites and rely on residual links to send traffic. Click through rate wouldn't be a problem as the only other way out is with the 'back' button.

Having discovered that I was paying for clicks from such pages, I have decided to stop running adverts until I can be sure this is no longer the case. I know this has been discussed before, but Google, do you really think this should be part of your business model?

[chinara]

I make sales from parked pages. You just have to keep an eye on your content traffic. if it makes money keep it, if doesn't, turn it off.

I have beef with adwords when they allow parked pages advertise, and do arbitrage on the keywords where i am biding. Why are they not getting nuked with the quality score?

[chief72]

.......ahh, because those we are discussing are search network partners, therefore beyond reproach.

[jimbeetle]

Something that has bothered me for a while is the question of why Google allows Ads to appear on parked domains.

When Google bought Applied Semantics [google.com] some years ago AS's DomainPark was an important part of the package. It's since been renamed AdSense for Domains [google.com].

Note: I saw a recent WebmasterWorld post that AS for domains is closed to new sign-ups but can't find anything else on this.