Google’s spam page claims parked domains are web spam.
Here’s something interesting to start your week.
Google has a page about “Fighting Spam” referring to pages designed to trick search engines such as cloaking and hidden text.
Listed right there underneath “Types of Spam” is this:
It’s completely understandable that Google doesn’t want to index parked domains. But to label them as spam? I take two issues with that.
1. In order to be web spam, the creator of the page should be trying to game Google to get the page indexed. Domain parkers don’t do that. They used to, but now we know our pages aren’t going to show up in Google, and there’s nothing the big players are doing to parked pages to try to circumvent that.
2. If a parked page is inherently spam, then Google powers a big chunk of spam. It’s Google ads that power over half of parked domains.
(Thanks Joe Politzer)
So am I reading that right, google is admitting that they are spammers ?
It is possible that Google might be shooting itself in the foot by deliberatley excluding simple low quality content websites (most personal blogs) and parked domains from search results. Many of these sites only carry google adsense as a way to pay for hosting costs. By blocking these sites Google is shutting off chanels for advertisers and hence its own revenue stream. But considering Googles monopoly on search and its huge cash rich position I doubt they take this into account. It is getting to the situation that the only way to be found in search is to pay Google a lot of money to be on page one for best keywords. Googles strategy has nothing to do with value of content or value to the searcher, its all about Google profits.
At first I thought it was Andrew’s April Fools Day gag, but sadly, it was true.
Thanx for the site – bookmarked it! Nice find. Puts the recent Google updates news in a nutshell.
Likely parking wound up in the SPAM category because there is no better place for it . . . When domains of interesting websites expire and go to parked page of the registrar, that is probably what Google is referring to. Probably those are a significant segment of what Google has to pay attention to!
Goog has gone from being a website directory and display service to the arbitor of all things internet. (well 70% of all things)
I think Graham got it right.
How far can they go without a pushback?
Registrars pull the rug out from under Google when they redirect expired domains that used to point to quality content.
Would you address that?
@ Louis – I think Google’s really good at getting those pages out of its index. At any rate, the registrar is not trying to fool Google by changing it to a parked page.
Parking or ghosted affiliate pages,not sure of the difference?
One thing to consider, Google based parking pages are all javascript based, and Google doesn’t index the javascript at all. They only index the text that is on the domain.
So they are not talking about the domains that are parked with them.
In my personal opinion, parked website is not spam.
I only park my personal website, give one image with some description, only about 10-20 words. That’s all.
So do my personal website considered as spammer? LOL.
Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Registrars milk the clicks out of pages which used to point to quality content. Google can’t predict when these domains expire or drop. I think it must be a big issue for Google to de-index Registrar parked pages.
This is a really good point which I hadn’t thought of..Google itself is making money off “spam” with its adwords.