AdSense for Domains – Does Google Care About the User Community?

Have you ever had misspelled a domain name, and went to a site to find out that the site only showed the sponsored ads with little or no other content? I have stumbled across these sites multiple times, and got annoyed by them, especially when I clicked on those pages from search engine results!

These sites do what is called “Domain Parking” – site owners simply register these domain names which are often misspellings of other popular domain names, and work with intermediate companies such as Traffic parking and sedo. These intermediate companies in turn partner with Google to run AdSense ads on those sites. When people visit the pages with the ads and click on those ads, site owners get a share of that revenue.

There has already been a lot of griping about this service in the industry because these sites offer a poor search experience to the searcher, and the quality of the traffic that comes from these sites is very poor and doesn’t give good ROI to those who advertise with Google’s content network. Mind you, to avoid this kind of low quality traffic, DBE recommends targeting your content network advertising, rather than haphazardly running content match ads.

But yesterday, Google has announced that it is extending AdSense of Domains to all publishers! Now, more and more publishers will try to take advantage of this offer. Search advertisers who opt in for “content network” will get even more of the lower quality traffic. And the searchers, who believe Google’s mission of presenting the world's information in a useful way, will find more garbage results because some of these domains will get indexed by Google and will end up in Google’s organic search results.

This and Google’s recent announcement on allowing bidding on hard liquor and beer show that Google is preparing well to capitalize on this poor economy. Google, please don’t pollute the Internet and at least prevent these Made for AdSense domains from appearing in search results!