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Pay-Per-Click Speculation Market Soaring
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that the number of web sites being opened purely to publish pay-per-click advertising links from the likes of Google
and Yahoo
is rocketing, according to VeriSign, which runs the .com and .net domain names." From the article: "Sclavos said that the company will change the way it reports the size of its domain name business, in terms of active registrations, because of the amount of speculation going on. It will reduce the size of the reported registrations by about 2%, he said. 'Names are being bought and then tested against traffic analyzers...The ones that can generate more than the $6 or $7 [registration] fee per year are kept, the other ones are returned within the five day grace period.'"
my guess is that Google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads
That's already the case -- you can't normally display AdSense ads on a site if the site doesn't have any content. If Google notices this or if someone reports it, they'll ask you to take off the ads or lose your AdSense account.
That said, Google and other third parties do offer domain parking facilities that explicitly allow you to show ads. But you have to explicitly sign up for that kind of program.
I don't know how any of this would be considered "illegitimate" use of domain names, though. It's the price you pay with an open market.
EricI'm not really sure why this is news. They should for sure exclude registrations that haven't passed their grace period when reporting activations... that's just common sense. A company can't fully book the revenue it receives if there's a return period. Same reasoning applies here.
EricRead about click fraud
Click fraud is a big problem and legitimate sites are running into it more and more often. Recently someone was targeting pay-per-click related ads on my sites (a lot of my content is related to that topic) and causing my earnings to skyrocket. But it was obviously illegitimate income. What you do is report your suspicions to Google and let them figure it out. I've always done this and kept on good terms with them.
Let's face it, no one forced you to sign up with Google's AdSense program. If you can't abide by the rules that they impose, you always have the option of finding another ad program to suit your needs.
EricRead about Alaska cruising
I typed in "cigar' in the google search box, and sure enough, there was not a single ad, just search results. Did they ever exprese any reasoning behind this, or is it just explained away as "policy"? I tried a few other similar searches and found that "guns" is verboten, while "rifle" and "shotgun" are fine. Also "cigarettes" are out, but strangely not "cigarette". "Beer" and "whiskey" are apparently right out, but not "wine"-- because we all know wine drinkers are sophisticated bluebloods and whiskey and beer drinkers like in a trailer park and shoot each other with "guns" while smoking a "cigar", right? "Murder", "pedophelia", and "strangler" are apparently okey dokey as ad words though, with "strangler" even encouraging us to look for one on eBay.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
how much can AdSense really earn you?
I get asked that a lot (well, I guess it's no surprise, since my book is titled "Make Easy Money with Google") but there are no firm statistics anywhere. All I have to go on is gut feel, really, but I suspect that most sites are earning between $50 to $250 a month. Some sites go way beyond that, earning several hundred or even several thousand dollars per month. And some, especially the new ones, will earn less. However, it's easy enough to make enough income to pay back your hosting costs, which is the first step.
There's no real secret to this stuff. In the end, the secret "AdSense formula for making money" comes down to this:
earnings = number of clicks * average price per click
You can derive almost everything from this formula, as I described in the article The AdSense Formula.
Generally speaking, the sites making a lot of money from AdSense get (no surprise) a lot of traffic. That's the hardest part -- getting the traffic, especially the right traffic.
EricWell, right now, the answer to that question is the search engine. Google (for instance) looks at your page and decides its relevance based upon a number of criteria. I personally think this is overall the best solution although of course it's not without its problems.
For the record, my job involves optimizing sites as well as working on algorithms to improve our sites' bidding on Overture and Adwords. This is what I do full-time. The sites I work on are well-regarded, well-established, useful sites with proprietary content (no, not porn).
Tell me, what use other than search engine enhancement does something like a title tag in a hyperlink REALLY have (yes, I know about the mouseover)? How about meta tags? How about rearranging the words in your page title so the most relevant ones show up first? These aren't dirty tricks, but they're designed to showcase the content that a site REALLY HAS, so that when a consumer goes to a search engine they find what they're looking for. We don't want to "trick" customers into visiting our sites. That's a very short-sighted tactic. We end up paying for bandwidth of a "non-qualified" "customer", and eventually our advertisers are going to catch on to this as well. It's the same as trying to lure homeless people into Nordstroms. They're unlikely to turn into customers.
Anyway, that's just a counterpoint to consider.
www.clarke.ca
Agreed. Especially since Google ranks your page by how many pages link to it, what is wrong with having an incentive to getting the word out about your site to all the other relevant sites?
I've seen it on my honeypot. They look for proxies that don't reveal themselves as such in the headers. They use lots of proxy judge sites such as http://www.softvb.com/cgi-bin/judge2-35.cgi, http://207.234.198.165/cgi-bin/prxjdg.cgi?en, http://motorscreensavers.com/cgi-bin/pxjdg12.cgi?e n,
l etlumina2.html - insurance-termsandcons.html
http://wilsonjack.ejunx.org/prxjdg.cgi
They fake the User-Agent and Referers fields in the headers to look like real traffic. I've seen the User-agent field change half a dozen times in a day from one host. That might be chained proxies, but here's something that isn't. One guy tried to fake a Referer as netbroadcaster.com but he did a typo the first time and it was netboradcaster.com, which doesn't exist.
Here are some sites they hit:
| 1 | http://www.findbestsite.com/
| 2 | http://www.mpww.net/white_yellow_page1.htm
| 3 | http://www.mpww.net/white_yellow_page.htm
| 4 | http://www.bigbusinessonline.com/chevrolet/chevro
| 5 | http://www.mpww.net/web_hosting1.htm
| 6 | http://www.ffgame.net/candy/scr2.htm
| 7 | http://www.mpww.net/travel.htm
| 8 | http://www.xwss.com/breakdown-insurance/breakdown
| 9 | http://www.mpww.net/womens_health.htm
| 10 | http://www.gamesir.us/games/boom_boom.html
| 11 | http://www.aoshao.com/watchout.shtml
| 12 | http://www.art-ton.us/fat/3d-ganes.php
| 13 | http://www.linksfortraveller.com/cruises.html
We don't need yet another new programming language. Let's just pick an existing language and fix its flaws.