AdWords Tip: Blocking Parked Domains on the Search Network

It's taken a couple of months, but I now have a good answer from Google regarding how to block parked domains on the AdWords search network. The reason I asked Google is because of this garbage traffic from AdWords. To be clear, I'm not saying all parked domain traffic is garbage. I just don't think Google should be blending that sort of traffic with pure search engine advertising. Keep it all on the content network or, better yet, create a new domain network. Be transparent. Don't be evil. That's all. Anyway, here's the response from Google:

Currently, it is possible to exclude parked domain sites using the site exclusion tool. However, depending on the domain, the exclusion method will differ. While most parked domains can be excluded by adding the specific domain into the site exclusion tool, there is a fraction of domains in our network that involve a process of excluding the domains at the partner level, rather than the specific domain level, resulting in the exclusion of all domains belonging to that partner due to technical details of the implementation.

For example, the site in question, searchportal.information.com is a site that belongs to such a partner network more commonly found as domainsponsor.com. Therefore, to exclude this domain, along with other domains that belong to this partner, ' domainsponsor.com' should be entered into the site exclusion tool.

Now, that said, we do realize that identifying which domains belong to these partners can sometimes be difficult for advertisers. For that reason, we are working on initiatives that we hope will simplify the opt-out process for our advertisers in the coming months.

As always, we recommend that advertisers monitor their conversion rates when deciding to exclude sites from their campaigns. We've found that our partners' parked domain pages can convert at rates similar to other partners' search portals and content sites in the Google Network.

Interesting. For the distribution fraud (Google's practice of distributing search engine advertising to places other than actual search engines) I noticed, the bulk of the referring URLs came from searchportal.information.com which is a part of DomainSponsor.com which is run by Oversee.net. Listing the actual domain searchportal.information.com in the site exclusion tool did not work. Google is telling me to exclude the domainsponsor.com domain and this will block ads from searchportal.information.com sites.

Bottom line: If parked domain traffic converts for you, keep it. If it's not quality traffic, block the domains you see in your logs. If that doesn't work, contact Google and find out the partner network domain to exclude.

Tags (byo w/ TagBuildr or TagMuse): google adwords, adsense for domains, parked domains, domain parking, search engine advertising, internet marketing, searchportal.information.com, domainsponsor.com, oversee.net, site exclusion, distribution fraud, pay per click fraud, ppc ads