8February 2007

Why all the domain parking?

Have you been perplexed by the garbage web pages being served up by Google and its ilk lately?  I just recently learned that the proliferation of crap in the search engines is due to a phenomenon called "domain parking."

Let me back up a little.

Several years ago Google started a little program called Adsense, which enabled hordes of ordinary people with hobby websites to monetize them with text ads. Up until then, it was too much trouble for the average Joe to find companies to sell banner-ad space to, and it involved a lot of technical issues like how do you prove how much traffic you have, and how many eyeballs see the banner, and how do you charge, and what do you charge... Well, suddenly all you had to do was plant a bit of JavaScript in the HTML of your pages and these text ads from Google's AdWords clients would appear. What's more, they were quite well targeted. If your visitors clicked on an ad, you would receive a percentage of the click fee.

That was right around the time that blog sites began to multiply like cyber-rabbits. Of course, the ads Google thinks would be a match can be hilarious on sites like blogs that don't have a particular focus. For instance, one blog I read mentioned a person named Ford. One of the Adsense ads was about truck parts.

I tried it out on my PugetSounders.com website (a little guide I created for my area of the Pacific Northwest) and it made decent money at first, but quickly dwindled to mere pennies a day. (Probably due to most of the ads being for real estate agents, and that was right about when the bottom dropped out of the online RE market.)

Not surprisingly, a lot of people got the bright idea that if one one-page garbage site could make a little bit of money, a thousand one-page garbage sites could generate a tidy sum. Since domain names are now so cheap and there is no limit to the letter/word/TLD combinations you can buy, search engine spammers started registering domains and putting up Adsense sites at an astonishing rate. Soon the search engines' databases filled up with "scraper" sites consisting of garbage content scraped from other sites for the sole purpose of hosting Adsense and Yahoo ads.

"Unintended consequences are situations where an action results in an outcome that is not (or not only) what is intended. The unintended results may be foreseen or unforeseen, but they should be the logical or likely results of the action. " (from Wikipedia)

Are things moving too quickly in the Internet industry for the powers that be to take the necessary time to ponder the possible consequences of their policy changes? Or have we simply become a society that cares about absolutely nothing but making money?