Google joins the spammer club
When I logged in to my AdSense account today, I could not believe my eyes: “AdSense for Domains - Get Started”. Is this some kind of joke? Apparently not.
Why am I so mad about it? It is because I like Google. And it hurts when someone or something you fancy turns to the dark side.
What is domain squatting?
There is no doubt you have visited a domain owned by a squatter before. Yet you may not be aware of it. They look like a normal low quality web sites. There are links with interesting anchor text, but all of them are actually ads.
Domain squatters register lots of domains and put useless (ad-overloaded) content (=spam) on these domains.
Domain squatters are interested in these types of domains:
- typo-domains - similar to an established site (hohhle.com instead of the real google.com),
- different top level domains - icofx.com instead of the real icofx.ro,
- expired domains - squatters will buy any expired domain,
- any short domains at all.
Google’s reaction
Until recently Google AdSense terms explicitly disallowed its use on web sites without content or on websites without any valuable content - the so called MFA (Made For AdSense) websites.
Now, with AdSense for Domains, Google has changed the rules of the game. They want to reward the spammers. It is no longer needed to actually contribute to the web to make some money with Google AdSense. You’ll actually get paid to make the web a worse place to navigate.
From the money perspective, this makes perfect sense. Domain squatting is here and it will be here for a while, so why not make some money off it? There are no legal obstacles, but there are moral ones. Each company should act consistently. When you simultaneously say that spam is bad and spam is good, you’ll lost trust. Has the economic crisis affected Google so much that they had to abandon their principles in a so obvious way?
What can we do about it?
Well, I personally would have to adjust my opinion about Google if this service is not canceled in a foreseeable future.
Other than that…hmm…anyone interested in writing a Firefox extension that would warn users when they visit a squatter domain? And what about Opera and IE? Can they do it?