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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.'"
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This can only go on as long as few enough do. When enough people start doing this, google can tell sites wanting to much money for their adspace to go stic it up. Then, legitimate sites will get hurt, advertising in general will be hurt since those fake sites is mainly a hoax.
Further, it is quite irritating, as most of those sites don't have a single piece of information. I remember a while ago a blog set up to earn money. The blog was about asbestos damage. Quite OK if they can provide content in addition to the ads. However, my guess is that google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Perhaps it would make sense to increase the registration fee and/or eliminate the grace period. That way, only those who are serious about maintaining a web site would be investing in one.
Isnt this just plain capitalism. If they can earn money of buying names and put up ads on them, then why not?
Dont sse any news here, move along.
NumB http://www.engvig.net
Caaught me off guard there. Good one!
And you saved me $19.99!
Mate you are getting ripped off: £8.99 from amazon UK
Actually got one check from google, Sadly even tho all of my sites were ligitamte and had real content not just faked up content, they booted me and said that I was generating false clicks, and then refused to tell me from where... This area needs to have some laws made regulating companies and there policies so the end users, the little guys, have some rights.
Google needs to periodically review it's "biggest earners" and see just how much it is updated, content wise, and also how many adverts per word their are.
Get rid of the sites where text and adverts fight for space, let legit sites prosper!
Hey, LinuxFormat from the U.K. costs me $18.99 an issue after exchange and shipping to Canuck Bucks. £8.99 sounds about right.
Meh.
Think about how many small internet projects have failed due to really dumb, non-descriptive domain names.
:(
Granted, some companies have been able to pull off misspellings (flickr), but how much more time is left before anything even remotely pronouncable is already registered?
If google really wants to "not be evil," they should find a way to pull the blanket from under these shams.. I almost wish domains were $100 a pop again just to make people think twice before doing this
It's too bad that search engine results are so full of all-advertising sites that good sites tend to fall though the cracks. I've seen a number of pretty-decent websites that didn't show up until the tenth page of a google search just because they weren't "Optimized for search engine traffic". It's annoying.
I read an article a while back that says that anyone who does anything purely for the purposes of making their websites show up higher on search engine results than they should are scammers. I believe it. No matter how whitehat you are, if you're trying to beat the system, you're a scammer. period.
Dumb ol' no-good-content-advertiser-based-websites.
Luke
----
This may be a shameless plug for my website, but at least it's got content.
I find it kind of strange that this problem exists in the first place. Since it's usually the same people who are registering/returning the domains, why can't they just some kind of limit in that only lets someone return 1 a day or something to discourage this type of behavior? Either that or make it a percentage system...you can only unload so many domains per day based on how many active domaions you have right now that have been there for a while (to make sure legitimate companies aren't penalized).
I'm curious, does anyone know how they "test against traffic analyzers"
I thought google adsense inserts ads that match site content. Are they building entire sites with relavent content, then testing generated clicks/revenues for that site? And I thought Google only rebuilds indexes every so often, which affect the likely hood that a person would find your site at all. Wouldn't it take a while for a site to really start generating interest, even if it were highly relavent to a search?
A modern day witchhunt.
I think there's a special wing of Hades reserved just for SEOs, spammers, and other suitwankers.
sigs, as if you care.
So between the domain name and faked keywords on the site trying to pump up the page rank, they're trying to get people to go to their site and then click on one of the pay-per-click links.
1. Put up a web page
2. Pray that just based on the domain name people will come
3. Profit
Yeah, I guess we know what step 2 is, but pay-per-click is pennies, and you have to do all that setup work coming up with names, hosting the site, etc. I suppose its profitable, but jeez, at what point is it just easier to get a job flipping burgers? Or maybe even a reputable IT job?
Google pay-per-click money is free only if your time is worth nothing.
There are tons of commercial SEO software products. They probably spend a half hour putting in some keyword lists that match their website name and then run a check on how that site would rank on google, yahoo, etc. Figuring a certain (very low) percentage of people will click an ad, and ballparking how many visitors they will get based on search ranking, they can tell how much the site is likely to make.
At least these speculators are recycling the names quickly when they're not using them. I get pissed off when I hit a website, and get one of those fake "search portal" fronts from a squatter. There's got to be a way to make people use the minimum appropriate domain names for their sites, without charging more than necessary for the name. Maybe a $50 deposit, refunded after a month, held in escrow by the registrar? Maybe a traffic requirement for retaining the name, if there are other bids for it? That can survive a cheap "click simulation service" that keeps up fake traffic?
--
make install -not war
Is Yahoo/Overture even supporting an AdSense equivalent at this point? Last time I looked into it, it was still being "developed".
I have several cigar related sites and Google as pretty much shunned the entire tobacco industry. I would openly welcome a competitor to AdSense by Yahoo/Overture.
Google only pays out once you've passed $100 in income. If these guys are only making $10/year, they won't be seeing anything anytime soon.
After reading all of the comments, I have yet to see a single reason why it's either google's or godaddy's responsibility to regulate what sites can be on the internet. The only quazi-reasons I have been able to deduce are "I don't like seeing advertisements". Regardless, hearing people say "godaddy should raise their price or not allow domains to be refunded" is quite possibly the worst solution I've heard... "let's screw over all consumers because I don't like ads!"
the main purpose of a trade show is to collect name, to make a contact list.
Nike spent million if not more doing this in the trade show business, then they stopped. Why?
Cause they had everyones name.
At what point does pay per click become pointless?
For google, don't most of us already know about www.google.com? not to mention how its becomming rather integrated with the internet in many ways.
Crappy websites yeild horrible traffic. I will pay $8 per click for good traffic. I won't pay at all for bad traffic. Google has steadily declined in the quality of traffic they provide over the past couple of years. Overture, too has slid.
Eventually, Google and Yahoo will have to cull the herd (actually they do right now). They must deliver a good value compared to other kinds of advertisements. Advertisers have pulled the rug out from under the online ad market before, and they will again if they see costs for conversions going sky-high. Right now that is the trend.
Another problem is that crap websites create noise in search engine results diluting Google's core product and Yahoo's second product (their first is the myYahoo! portal).
-- $G
Welcome to the information highway, complete with billboards!
Really, do they care? Google and Yahoo both work to *not* list SPAM sites... But, say a site has zero content on it, and the site is only ads, and the site is not listed in the search engines, but people still visit, click, and buy. Who cares?
Why would a registrar ever do that? They make money on registrations. Someone is kindly doing them the favor of searching the domain-space for registrations that are worth some money, and then giving the registrar the money. That they return a few is just an operating cost, it's still mostly profit for the provider of the grace period.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The new way is now to sell this idea in TV commercials to suckers who think the idea is brilliant, and expect to rake in the thousands of dollars a week that the "pioneers" did. The registrations are probably from all the $79.95 instruction booklet, get rich quick wannabes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The fraud is against the advertisers who pay Google to put their publicity in sites with good content. If the sites go to empty sites, they are still paying Google for nothing and loosing money. I know people who stopped to put ads in content sites due to lower return by investiment.
The advertisers are still getting clicks. What do they care if the referring sites have no content?
"But there's nothing illegal about what this particular type of business is doing."
Which is exactly why it is news. Slashdot is saying, "hey, look what this ass hats are doing". I haven't seen anyone argue in favor of the "service" they are offering in exchange for the money they are leaching. Therefore, it looks like a great scam to ban by technical means. But first someone has to bring up the issue so it can be discused, and a solution devised.
They are worse than useless, they are getting paid to be harmful. Thankfuly there is no law against making this kind of business technicaly impossible.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
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.
Actually, I think it would be great if google would just allow more search terms to be supplied. I usually use a lot of minus terms to try and filter out the junk, and run into the maximum pretty quickly.
For instance, if all of the undesired sites shared one phrase, say, "search categories" then it would be easy enough to blow them away by putting a -"search categories" on the search line. Not much chance that the uninteresting sites will want to include an obvious "this site sucks" keyword target though, once they learn that people are avoiding it.
I guess another way to solve this is that all decent sites could get together and decide to use a positive keyword, like say:
- "unfescennine" or
- "creative commons license" or
- "non-profit site" or
- "all code is licensed under the GPL"
...and include that on their pages. If enough sites were clued in to this idea, you could get search results that would then only include the "decent" sites.That would work for a little while until the ad sites get wise to the trick and begin to use that keyword themselves (won't their lawyers be surprised someday if they mindlessly use the last one...)
Should a keyword change be necessary, coordinating it amongst the "good" sites would be a nightmare, though.
Hmm, maybe a better solution is just to participate in GPU, a distributed community-run GPL search engine. I've never used it, so I can't vouch for the performance, but at least you have a chance to modify the search algorithm itself.