Internet Marketing Toolbox

During the last week, I’ve been updating one of my long established business web site directory. As well as a much needed theme makeover, I’ve killed off all the directory pages that point to dead links - that was fun - over 1000 pages removed, and all done by hand.

But one thing I discovered while doing this task made me feel quite ill, and makes me wonder why we tolerate this type of behaviour???

So what happens to your domain name when you decide you don’t want to renew it (or forget to renew it)?

You’d imagine that it would just lapse, and that would be it… but a significant percentage of expired domains are snatched up and have PPC (pay per click) ads placed on them. And according to my “contact” in the industry, this is a very good way to make money!

I noticed three main “networks” engaged in this practice during my clean up, and probably around 25% of the 1000+ sites I deleted had one of these types of ads on them:

GoDaddy appear to be “parking” the page “free” as a “courtesy” for the domain owner… (see right)

But strangely enough, each page is jammed pack full of “Sponsored Listings” (Google Adwords ads) and surrounded by other “related” search links - which of course lead to even more pages and pages of “sponsored listings”, and advertisements for GoDaddy services.

And then there’s this interesting variation on the left… I noticed the same basic design many times - with the picture regularly changing, depending on the main keywords in the domain name. Again, the never ending internal linking to even more “related” keyword pages chock ‘o block full of hundreds of Google ads…

Strange, but I thought this sort of behaviour went against Google’s terms and conditions of participation in their Adsense program…. but maybe that applies only to “small” publishers?

But Google’s not the only PPC firm that allows this crap to pollute the ‘net.

This next offering to the right features ads from Overture… same deal - lots of sponsored listings to relevant keywords…

But what REALLY got up my nose was that this was on the expired domain for “childcancerandyou.org”.

So what’s the problem you might ask?

How about the advertisers that are being ripped off with non-targeted clicks on their ads? I certainly would NOT want my ads to appear on this type of site.

How about the surfers who have to negotiate this minefield of garbage when they are looking for something… especially when looking for answers to serious issues like cancer?

What about the people who used to own these domain names and may have had some sort of “reputation” attached to the business there? All the hard work they have previously done to establish some sort of traffic is simply redirected into the pockets of these domain name squatters.

What if you “forgot” to renew your domain in time, only to have it snapped up by these jokers (quite likely to happen by the looks if you register through GoDaddy….)?

It’s not a good side of the industry.

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