Google's Parked Domains Illegal?

Vulcan Golf, a provider of golf equipment, filed a complaint against several companies including Google for placing adverts on multiple parked domains. As you might know, the search giant offers AdSense for Domain, a special flavor of its advertising solution that allows parked domain owners to earn money by placing adverts on their "websites". Among other companies that were accused of illegal practice, Google is criticized for serving adverts on millions of websites that are actually there only to generate revenue without a clear content.

"Google's program is somewhat obscure and unusual. It is only available to domain names that don't have any content (other than the ads provided by Google), and Google effectively takes control of the pages itself," lawyer Eric Goldman said today. "However, from my perspective, Google in fact treats the domain name exactly like a search query; the domain name acts like a keyword to trigger ads, no different from the way Google treats a searcher's keywords as a trigger for ads on its website."

Basically, Vulcan is referring to certain domains related to its official website that might attract traffic due to typing errors. Because most of these domains are already displaying adverts, some of the users are redirected to different golf sites instead of visiting the original page of Vulcan.

As the lawyer noted, "AdSense for domains customers redirect traffic from parked domains to the AdSense for domains service. When Google receives the request, it processes the domain name and returns formatted HTML that includes contextual ads and related searches. Customers can either display the full page HTML or include it in a frame." This means that Google displays adverts depending on the users' search queries but they might not necessarily include the original page searched by the visitor that is quite an unfair method for the owner of the main website.