Overview
Domain parking companies have been profiting from both domain names that have expired and been snapped up again, and from completely newly registered domains: domain parking has now become big business, with Google having now entered the fray! Thousands of domains are being registered every year by domain name squatters, with cybersquatters and typosquatters having recognised the business opportunities to be snapped up albeit morally unsound and now being prosecuted on far more frequent bases. Google domain parking, or Adsense for Domains as it is also known, has now developed an algorithm to eliminate those sites that are likely to attract fewer clicks than are likely to be profitable for Google, also in the hope that this algorithm will also weed out many of the illegal domain owners impersonating some of the most popular names on the High Street.
Adsense for Domains
Doing away with the middle-man was Googles mantra when it first introduced its Google domain parking service. Since then, as all services do, it has evolved and now applies a Google domain parking algorithm to each domain name, assessing its potential semantically to the possibility of searches related to the domain names content before accepting the domain for parking. As with all other domain parking, the domain website is solely filled with links which, according to the law of averages, the visitor will click on to navigate their way to a site relevant to their search. When a visitor clicks on an advertising click the request is received by Google and processed, interpreting the HTML or XML with which the page is formatted and returns the requested page to the visitor.
Google search engine results tend to return low rankings for those domains that use Google domain parking due to the predominance of commercial links. Nevertheless, despite these diminutive ratings, Google domain parking insists that each domain that is put forward for inclusion in their parking service attracts a minimum of 750,000 page views every month. One thing that Google domain parking services do encourage is the domain tasting idea which, in effect, is an open invitation to cybersquatter to earn money without being penalised.
The way tasting through the application of Google domain parking works is that the domain owner sets up their domain pages and allows advertisements to run on them. The cybersquatter can then delete any domains within a 5 day period to be refunded in full and keep 100% of the revenue their sites may have generated during that time: clearly, for the cybersquatter, this is a win-win situation. It can also work to the advantage of the genuine domain owner who wants to try out various domain names to see which ones are likely to generate sufficient clicks to make them a feasible income per month.
If a domain owner has 100 sites bulk-registered and, out of these, just 1% of them generate sufficient click-through traffic within 5 days to make these sites financially viable, the other 99% can be deleted in accordance with Googles refund policy. The domain owner will receive a full refund on those sites that are deleted, so will have had a chance to try them and see if they attract a click-through rate knowing they are not going to lose anything for trying. Again, for genuine domain owners, this is a win-win situation.
