Brand protection firm MarkMonitor recently released the latest version of its Brandjacking quarterly survey. Among the company's findings, company CMO Fred Felman told WebProNews they witnessed a significant year over year drop in domain kiting, which is the serial registration of the same domains over and over again.
This drop corresponded with another declining form of brand abuse. Kiters regularly placed the Google product AdSense for Domains onto their continuously registered domains. They essentially kept the domain name perpetually registered, at minimal cost, while reaping click-through profits from the ad placement.
Google shut that window when it began requiring domains to be open for six days before being considered for acceptance into AdSense for Domains. MarkMonitor's numbers showed the impact: for the first quarter of 2008, pay per click abuse dropped by 42 percent year over year, by their research.
Other abuses happened through the mechanism of search engine optimization. Someone looking for adult traffic, in an example shared by Felman, set up a site stuffed with travel keywords. The site served its purpose, gaining valuable placement in the search rankings and driving traffic to it.
Once that traffic began arriving in volume, helped along with a spam campaighn, the domain owner swapped out the keyword-stuffed content for adult advertising. Visitors expecting to find something related to travel received an eyeful of scantily clad woman and plenty of links to adult sites.
Felman said MarkMonitor sees this brand abuse happen a lot. People game SEO with gibberish search terms. He also contended the travel-turned-adult site work was a planned tactic, with no change in registration when the site flipped content.
As people look for travel deals online, Felman suggested they avoid purchasing airline travel vouchers from auction sites. Despite the purported discount, such vouchers are not transferable to others. Felman said MarkMonitor gave it a try to see if such a voucher purchased this way would work.
It didn't. Avoid such auctions when planning your vacation this summer. They simply serve as a way to move money from innocent people to scammers.
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Comments
i am still not sure why
i am still not sure why Google allows Adsense on parked domains. Is the main reason for turning off content networdk for my Adwords campaign.
And I believe many advertisers are losing big money because Google is greedy.
I hate that
You know it only takes a few spammers to really bugger things up for a whole slice of the industry.
There are plenty of small- time 'net pornographers, who do it for the love of it, and the desire to produce something different from the soul-less industry standard, but because many people see it as a 'get rich quick' scheme, not a valid industry, they abuse the system, and we (the legit ones) get tarred with the same brush.
Some of us have been building our sites and our loyal following for years, and resent it when an idiot does a bit of spamming and stuffing, and pulls in all 'our' revenue.
Oh, and before I get a load oif replies saying "yeah, very funny, you've got an adult link in there!", that is my homepage, and you don't have to click on it if you don't want to.
Besides, the name isn't exactly hiding anything, is it?
domain kiting and tasting
Thanks for a great article. For most part I do understand how Domain kiting works but I could never undertand the domain tasting. When I put a site up it can take months before it gets on any search engine or start to receive traffic let alone clicks on google or other advertising. How do these big players figure out what domains potential is in five days by puting it online...I applaud googles effort in this regard but all along small players have been kept at disadvantage by allowing kiting and tasting by big players. Even with what google has done to stop the kiting, it will have a little impact as I understad that google and yahoo etc display their ads through wholesalers . The ads displayed through these wholesalers do not have to abide by the google rule or rules made by other ad supplier..
Great stuff
Great news, I think the focus for google, now more than ever, is reducing spam and figuring out how to deliver quality results.
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