Dead Landing Pages in Google
Posted at 1:14pm EST on 11/24/2008
Domain squatters make a boat load of money every year by grabbing expired or unregistered domains. Here is one example where Google’s quality of results is diminished by a domain squatter.
I was looking up a restaraunt one of my friends recommended for a place to eat. So I looked up the restaraunt name and location where I knew it was. Great! It pulled up an excellente result with a map, phone number, and website.
Let’s click in to see what the website looks like.
Oh snap, it’s a dead page! Looking at the whois information, the owner of the domain is “Portfolio Brains, LLC.” According to the whois, this domain own also has 98,536 other domains registered.
Well that just puts a damper on my day that I try to go to Google looking for a quality result and it comes up dead.
The question now arrises, should Google take action on domain squatters’ domains and de-list them in some fashion or should they continue to let domain squatters get away with using expired domains for personal benefit only to diminish the quality of their search results?
It’s a serious question and one that has probably been on the minds of Google executives for quite a while. Domain squatting is a huge business. [Not only squatting, but domain sales in general.]
Obviously I wanted the real website, but because of this domain squatter, I got a landing page instead with some ads that are completely irrelevant to the information I was seeking. I was looking for photos of the place to job my memory, but found nothing at that site.
Google has a program dedicated to parked domains utilizing a flavor of AdSense, but does it mean that Google values the dollar more than the user experience?
Keep an ear out this week for an article talking about how Yahoo! values the user experience more than the dollar.
