In an announcement today on the official Google Adsense blog it was announced that they will be opening up and extending the Adsense feed for domains to all website publishers. This will allow anyone regardless of domain portfolio size to monetize thier domain inventory even for undeveloped domains. From the official posting:

“With AdSense for domains, users can find relevant information rather than see empty pages or “page not found” errors. Today we present ads, links, and search results on the pages, and may add other useful information in the future. To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.”

In an interesting statement they actually say “ads on these pages convert well”. Is this Googles way of recognizing that some parked pages actually do convert users? It sounds that way to me. But for them to generalize it so much..well lets just say I dont totally agree with that. They may convert to a click ffor the publisher, but will it ultimatley convert to a sale for the advertiser? Thats the real question in my mind. SO in a war with the parking companies Google itself just became the biggest parking company of all. This is interesting to me for so many reasons. It seems they are trying to monopolize the very industry that they held in such low esteem for so long. Do No Evil? I continue to see this mantra turned on it’s nose with the passing years as Google speaks out of one side of it’s mouth saying Parking companies are bad they rip off advertisers and junk up the internet…while speaking out the otherside to say something like why dont we just shut all the competition down and become a parking company ourselves.

Whats next Google domain tasting? How about some domain kiting or warehousing? Just go ahead and snatch up t he expiring domains and push them out with your domainer ads on them. Are you also going to tweak your search algorythm to push certain domainers portfolios to the top? This would certainly increase your revenue would it not?

One domainer had this to say “I think there is a lot of upside here for everyone. Many of the parking companies are garbage anyway so those guys will probably have a lot of challenges ahead.

As for the quality parking companies I think this little shakeup is exactly what the industry needs to kick start development teams to provide better landing pages, customized features and anything to help domain owners build out parked sites.”

Is this the positive competition domain parking companies needed to get busy improving the products they offer? Or is this simply a first step towards the end of domain parking companies for the exception of Google.

Google will probably end up banning users, and tweaking rev shares and this alone may be enough to keep domainers with the high performing parking companies. Or maybe the domainers will actually show some loyalty and support for the very companies who helped them make all the money they have over the years, although i seriously doubt it.

On a positive note for parking companies it seems that so far domainers will not be able to customize, add graphics etc to the templates and pages offered by Google for Domains, and likely domainers will not be able to simply pick up the phone and get the same level of dedication and service that many parking companies offer to thier users. The only options so far seem to be picking the colors much like that of a basic adsense setup, but these options may expand as time goes on.

Only time will tell the impact this will have on the domaining industry and parking companies and Google themselves. We can only hope that 1. hundreds of people wont lose thier jobs over this 2.The internet wont become even more junked up than it is

Happy Holidays

An Update!

It appears that the feed is limited to content feed only not search. The only way thatyou get the search feed resultsis if you actually do a search. Let me know what your experiences are!

The Google quality score has recently undergone some changes to make it more accurate and provide users with higher quality advertisers. Google is introducing some changes in the coming days and you should notice a few things different in your adwords account. One of the changes is that quality score will now be measured at the moment of each search query. You will also notice that the keywords are no longer marked inactive for search and your minimum bid will disappear and be replaced with first page bid.

So what does all this mean for you? Well it will allow for a dynamic landing page quality score instead of a static one. This will hopefully allow domainers to make improvements to their sites and bring down some of those 10.00 minimum bids to a more reasonable price. This should also allow your ad’s to show when most relevant and increase conversions.

First page will replace minimum bids. This will give an idea of how much you have to bid to show in a placement again. For a while it was completely unknown. At least now you know that you can bid x amount and show up on the first page of search results. This is based on the “exact match” keyword, ad quality score, and competition on that keyword.

No more inactive for search! This is cool because due to the new quality score we can now have the opportunity to serve up in more highly converting places and not show in less optimal spots. This is a huge improvement over judging the ad quality one time and scoring it as a static score for all websites and search queries you may be bidding on. This could help some advertisers gain a little more volume, however if you had an abundance of inactive for search you may find that they don’t get a lot of traffic after the changes either. I recommend going through and cleaning up your keywords for underperforming ones and place emphasis on less keywords that are very targeted. Structure your ad groups so they make sense and all keywords within the ad group are related to each other. In addition to this remove keywords that have not had at least 100 impressions for the month. These will drag your ad quality score down. These should be positive changes for everyone the publishers, the advertisers, and the users.