Why Google finally says NO to manually redirected traffic + + Shitstorm is brewing...

[mike031]

Why Google finally says NO to manually redirected traffic +++ Shitstorm is brewing as we speak!

Google recently announced that they won’t be accepting anymore redirected traffic to any parked pages which display the Google AdWords PPC inventory. This move is going to have tremendous consequences throughout the entire domain industry come next week. Some parking companies are going to see 50% to 99% losses in revenue… The shakeout will take a few month’s to materialize into a huge shitstorm I predict.

The main reason that Google is requiring people to park their domains using a certain set of provided name servers is to avoid the abuse of fraudsters and scammers from using domains for parking which they do not own. You must be asking yourself… Huh? Well, let me elaborate.

For many many years, just about all parking companies allowed you to manually redirect traffic to a certain lander which either had your unique ID within it and/or domain… All ads clicked on that lander would be credited to your account. So what scammers and fraudsters have been doing is adding domains which they do not own to their accounts, and sending traffic to the provided lander.. What type of traffic exactly? Ghost traffic… Abritrage traffic… Error… Porn… Or of course, the most popular, human clicks AKA click fraud.

...read entire post at http://www.wannadevelop.com/blog/goo...s-click-fraud/

[dcristo]

Parking income was always going to be a fad. The ultimate goal of online marketing is development, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. Why the heck would you want to limit your traffic/revenue potential leaving a domain name parked? And if you are too lazy to develop domains stop asking so much for your names and sell them or get off your ass and do something about it. Parking companies that have a future provide many more services besides just being able to park domains with a lander.

[Gerry]

Would be nice for the OP to post a source, a link, some juice for the mix...

The articles that speak of Google blocking redirects deal with China and other foreign countries.

[mike031]

Parking income was always going to be a fad. The ultimate goal of online marketing is development, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. Why the heck would you want to limit your traffic/revenue potential leaving a domain name parked? And if you are too lazy to develop domains stop asking so much for your names and sell them or get off your ass and do something about it. Parking companies that have a future provide many more services besides just being able to park domains with a lander.

Amen brother

[Mark Talbot]

Parking in general needs to go,... far away.

It is so detrimental to the basic concept of domaining and subsequent valuation, and is nothing but a way to make a few bucks on a domain that otherwise is only just for sale somewhere.

I havent looked back since leaving parking.

my2cents

[afloat.com]

Article doesn't make sense to me, even if a domain uses the parking dns instead of a url forward you can still send crappy traffic to it, for what good it would do.

[katherine]

Parking income was always going to be a fad. The ultimate goal of online marketing is development, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. Why the heck would you want to limit your traffic/revenue potential leaving a domain name parked? ...

'Development' is not a magic formula. In fact development generally means (in practical terms): put up some crappy website with non-unique contents, then put some adsense on it and forget about it. How different is it from parking ? (Hint: you still depend on a single source for your income).
The reality is that unique content does not grow on trees and building websites into fully-fledged businesses is not scalable when you own lots of domains. Personally domain sales bring much more money than parking, fortunately there are different ways of making money with domain names.

[DomainsInc]

all you people dissing parking must not own many domains. how do you develop 20,000?

[Acro]

There's nothing wrong with domain parking. What's wrong is parking companies offering the same old (crap) landers for years. This leads visitors to getting accustomed to the look and feel of parking pages; ergo, fewer clicks on parked domains.

[dcristo]

'Development' is not a magic formula. In fact development generally means (in practical terms): put up some crappy website with non-unique contents, then put some adsense on it and forget about it. How different is it from parking ? (Hint: you still depend on a single source for your income).
The reality is that unique content does not grow on trees and building websites into fully-fledged businesses is not scalable when you own lots of domains. Personally domain sales bring much more money than parking, fortunately there are different ways of making money with domain names.

Thats where you have it all wrong my friend. Throw the word scalable out the window. The emphasis should be on a few select premium domains and get rid of the rest. Thats how you build multi-million dollar empires, developing thousands of crappy websites ain't going to get you anywhere. You have to treat each domain name like a business if you spread yourself too thin you will make nothing with all of them. Just because there is a low barrier to entry on the internet doesn't mean you should get involved in every industry.

Even if you wanted to hold on to some domains which had potential to make end user sales, you can always develop them into something better then a simple PPC landing page with limited development skills, but for the most part I think your time would be better spent building out a few very good domains.

[David G]

Since you said ".....The emphasis should be on a few select premium domains...." and many of us have different opinion about what 'premium' is can you give some examples of some of your most select premium names you have developed so we can see the type of names you are referring to?

[dcristo]

I think its hard to go wrong with good generic keyword domains. They are good for SEO and due to the website intent being clear it encourages click through rates.

[Mark Talbot]

all you people dissing parking must not own many domains. how do you develop 20,000?

That suggestion is just wrong, and patently obvious to only support parking.

My point is not to develop 20k domains, I mean really, how many of us actually own 20k+ domains.

My point is more in the analogy of real estate brokering and sales.

A real estate agent may have potentially thousands of listings, yes. But they dont go developing hardly any of them. They just want to sell them as-is.

More to the point, they dont plant billboards on all of them either to scrape a few bucks from them in the time they sit on them prior to sale..

And if they did, it would in fact reduce the property valuation to a buyer.

(edit to add - unless the intent was to buy a domain to flip, would this be beneficial to lower the buy price from a flipper perspective))

[katherine]

My point is not to develop 20k domains, I mean really, how many of us actually own 20k+ domains.

Not so many domainers own 20k+ domains, but a few hundreds is quite common. It's already more than you can handle alone.
It could be said that domainers own too many domains, but so many domains are just too good to be left unregistered (just considering their resale potential). Even the top portfolio holders own at least tens of domains but it's usually in the hundreds.

While parking is under-utilization of a domain name, it helps monetize traffic that would otherwise be lost. In theory parking should be a transitional step in the lifetime of a yet to be developed domain name, but we know that transition can last quite long.

But PPC fraud/abuse is a more general issue, it goes well beyond parking.
It sounds like a good excuse for Do-no-evil Google to cut back on payouts.
When are we going to have transparency in the PPC industry ?