Is it Time for a New Search Advertising Model? - The Bad Flavor of Domain Tasting
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I’ve covered the topic of domain tasting more extensively in a different SEO Chat article. These are the kinds of sites that many people think of most when the topic of click fraud or search engine advertising abuse comes up. While domain tasting was more or less made possible by the International Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, and VeriSign, it’s click fraud that helps to fuel it and make it popular.
Modern domain tasting works something like this: entrepreneurs purchase a whole slew of domain names from VeriSign. They then load up the domain with pay-per-click ads from Google or Yahoo, and maybe use a scraper bot to add something resembling content. Once the "site" is created, they monitor it to see how much money comes in over the next few days. If more than enough comes in to pay the registration fee, they keep it. But if they don’t get that much money in five days, they return the domain name to VeriSign and get a full refund.
Considering that VeriSign charges only $6 per year per domain name, it doesn’t take much traffic or very many click-throughs before the sites pay for themselves. Many of the domain names are typos of trademarks. That’s partly because some of the big-time domain tasters monitor the searches that are typed into Google and other major search engines (just think of the Google Zeitgeist, which lists the top 10 searches in Google every week). Web surfers often search for information on “Nike sneakers” or “Apple computers” or other items produced by high-profile companies, and they don’t always spell very well. While Google’s “Did you mean?” feature helps set many of them on the right path, it doesn’t change what was originally typed into the search engine.
So other web surfers type in what they’re looking for, either in the search engine or sometimes in the address bar, and they wind up at a web site that has nothing to do with what they’re really looking for. They might even click on ads on the site in the belief that it will take them where they’re trying to go – and every one of those clicks is paid for by some advertiser. Some of the owners of these domain tasting, made-for-AdSense sites even suggest that they’re doing a service for the trademarks they typo, saying that such companies can always take out an ad on their web sites to redirect users – and thus pay the domain taster for every web surfer sent to the right place in this way. Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I think that takes a lot of nerve – and if search engine advertising wasn’t so easy and profitable for these MFAs, we’d probably see less of this kind of thing.
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