[URL snipped]
(note this website has NOTHING to do with the search terms, is registerered with godaddy.com by [snipped]
Will google crawl this page and think it's a legitimate URL website? Thus diluting my advertising.
[edited by: buckworks at 9:01 pm (utc) on April 14, 2008]
[edit reason] No specifics, please. [/edit]
I'm not sure what you mean by "diluting" your advertising.
Another thing that's REALLY BAD is that the instructions for Blogger Custom Domains are WRONG and create canonical problems with the A-record getting parked there and running garbage ads without the domain owner's consent - or even their knowledge if they don't know enough to check.
That is 100% Google's responsibility and there's no way to let them know they need to correct their instructions.
My surprise was not that they were there but at the number of impressions they were generating.
One site which I had never heard of before that has our area name and a misspelling of the slang for prostitute had generated almost 1000 impressions in one day.
Where were people finding this link or is it connected with a "pay to click" operation? If so then who is benefiting from the AdSense payments? Is it GD or the owner of the domain?
I immediately blocked it however it all seems very odd to me.
Furthermore, when I run a report that shows which site and page your ad was showing (Google), I saw something that was referring to parked domains or whatever was called.
I phoned support and after little chat, the CSR explained me I should be able to opt out from such sites. After poking around (while on the phone) we concluded I had no option he was referring to so he did it for me.
Before he did the action, he explained to me that such sites can convert well. I was persistent in to have this turned OFF.
Now, many of those domains were misspellings and variations of trademarks and product names. All made on purpose, nobody ever planned to use those for anything else.
Then, clicks from those sites were quite expensive. I find this interesting if I compare it to what’s called “other unique queries” in search query report for search campaigns. Those terms always have high CTR and are of high CPC. Somehow I feel connection between the two.
All this also reminds me onto other post about ISPs redirecting people to such pages, rather then having default 404 showing.
All together, I think this is kind of legitimate spam and cheating on valued customers like myself. If I want my ads showing on Google, AOL, and Ask, then let it be that way, period.
It is just that if we spend $1,000 today, and $$2.50 or $10 of that was based on clicks from such sites (or even more), we oversee it. Not that we can do something about it, but simply we ignore it as we have other more important things to do.
How many advertisers do this in the same way?
It’s the same concept as our online businesses (including affiliate business). It is hard to explain to a full time employee in local store what it means when you reach such big audience on the Web. Nobody ever thought you can make a big buck in this way. Sale here, sale there and here is someone’s annual salary.
Now, can you imagine what portion of Google’s big buck are those PEANUTS? They are “small” like a Moon.
I fully agree with and support an idea of requesting more control over where and how our ads are showing, being that search or content.
Some of these sites use adware and spyware to get eyes on these parked pages, content is a bunch of ads and is autogenerated and often has been shown to be intertwined with click fraud and malware... try that as a G advertiser and see how fast you get $10 min bids! Unfortunately, they haven't focused properly on this area yet, it remains a problem and I think that G thinks smart pricing will handle it, problem is, that mindset lacks an understanding of how adware / malware can manage to make it look like they referred a converting visitor... so they've got the geniuses at G still fooled... for now. Their biz model lacks value though, so it won't last, hang in there and wait and watch, and eventually they'll go the way of MFA sites who tried to advertise on the search network.
I hope it will go that route (to fix it). I want to have one check box for each of Google Search Network entities. One for AOL, one for Ask, one for each whatever big as those two, and one for parked domains network or anything similar. All this control should be available for both search and content, fitting the concept of each.
If Google can control how they serve our ads, and track clicks and apply cost to them, they can certainly transfer that into our accounts’ interfaces, period.
