Click Fraud Blog
Dubious Practices of Adwords For Domains
October 25th, 2007
Google have come under a lot of criticism this week for some of the less than scrupulous activities they are engaging with in the Adwords for domains programme.
The adwords for domain programme lets very large players in on-line search such as AOL or ASK syndicate the adverts of Adwords on their own sites. In exchange for this, Google pays out a share of the Adwords revenue.
This is a worthwhile and valid way to extend the reach of Adwords ads, and the search network helps Google to reach over 80% of the internet audience, but there are a number of properties which are not returning high quality clicks, but Google are charging their customers a premium.
The problem stems from domain parking companies such as DomainSponsor. Domain parking is the practice of holding a domain open on the internet without having any valid content on it. This is usually due to pre-registered domains which have never been developed, with the original purchase reason being to resell the domain.
So DomainSponsor and a number of other domain parking companies have signed up for the Adwords for domain programme, and are displaying adwords for domain ads on the parked sites. These ads are in context with the domain name.
People come to these domains largely by accident and any clicks on these made for adsense sites are usually of very low quality, and are unlikely to generate a conversion for the advertisers.
Now we come to the root problem of these sites, Google charge an advertiser for any clicks as if they were premium clicks emanating from a genuine search engine. This is direct contradiction to the Google policy of reducing the cost per click of low quality sites displaying ads via the adsense programme which these clicks closely resemble.
This is NOT click fraud, rather it is low quality clicks being masked as premium search clicks which tarnishes the reputation further of an organisation which deliberately obscures it operating procedures.
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Tags: click quality
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