The Problem With Syndicating Paid Search Ads

Richard Ball over at the Apogee Weblog has an interesting post this week that looks into the relationship that Google AdWords has with partner sites. In it, he claims that Google is colluding with spammers by feeding junk traffic from parked domains. He's upset because Google often lumps these domains in with the sites in their search network. That means that the only way to opt out of them is to decide to opt out of the valuable traffic that comes from some of Google's more mainstream search partners.

Here's how Richard lays it out...(snipped for brevity, read the full post at his blog)

Now there are several issues at play here (and it really is worth reading his full post instead of the little snippets here) and on some points I agree with Richard and on other points I do not.

I think the absolute most important point to take from his post is the issue of having parked domains included in the search network. Sure, these sites will sometimes have search engines attached to them, but let's not fool ourselves. Few people type in a direct domain that ISN'T google.com or ask.com or what-have-you and plan to conduct a search when they get there. Thus, these types of sites really should be counted as part of the content network, not the search network. He's absolutely right when he says that Google needs to provide advertisers with a way to opt out of having their ads appear on these sites.

See the thing about parked domains is that they CAN provide a legitimate source of targeted traffic. It's also not unusual for a company to own hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of domains and to funnel traffic from all of them to a single site. That's how people catch misspellings, typos and even junk URLs and make something of the traffic.

The way I see it, Richard makes a good call in stating that advertisers need to band together to demand that these types of sites be placed in a category that allows advertisers to opt out of them without having to opt out of the entire search network. On the other hand, I just can't back his inference that "domainers" are spammers.

That said, it's a good reminder that you should constantly be checking the referrers that paid search networks send to your sites. Fraud or not, you need to come up with a way to deal with the clicks that don't convert.