Highbrow Arbitrage Pages

I challenge you to look at the Custom Wheels site Sahar uncovered (through the eyes of a non-pro) and tell me whether it's a Parking/Arbitrage page or a real content site. 

Don't look at it through jaded eyes..  Open your mind and tell me how this Paid Search page is worse than 99% of other sites on the Internet.  Stuff like this is the future of domain name parking..  A site for every name. Real content which is really about the advertising.

This morning I was in line at the bank in Cayman and the "Price Is Right" was on the TV.. (yes, they have TV's playing game shows in the retail bank branches here) The people in the line laughed and clapped as the contestant won a new car! Then the commercial came on ..  It struck me that the Price is Right was nothing more than a giant commercial.  They played the game, guessing the right price of something to get on stage, guessed whether the $1.01 price of a can of soup was 'then' or 'now' to win a prize..  guessed the price of the prizes in the showcase, to win that showcase.  I was entertained, the bank line-up was entertained.  How is that different than the home shopping channel? ... Or more to the point,  How is that different than Domain Parking and Paid Search? 

A user types a name looking for something, we serve ad content and product links related to that something and low and behold,  people click..  Big surprise :)  ..  The user leaves satisfied that they found what they were looking for.  Now if we could just find a way to entertain them (keep them engaged) like CustomWheels.com does.

Man,  it's going to cost me a fortune to license that animated Bob Barker sitepal character  ;)

Comments

[IPTV]

Hi,

It just an "adsense" publishers site...people have been doing this for the last couple years. A good pretty good one grant you....but not much of a step up from this on I have:

BTW: I have no website building skills at all...LOL

http://icebergroses.com/

Peace,
Dan

***FS*** Thanks Danno.. I've seen lots of these over the years too bro.. but i particularly liked this one. I think I tried to buy the name once.

[IPTV]

Hi,

I forgot...

This site will be hard for google to detect, but it is in violation of their TOS for adsense publishers...because it looks like it has "real content"...when in reality if you click on anything it takes you around in circles...except of course you click on an adsense ad.

It was designed solely to make asense income and get the site "ranked" for the "search terms" listed on the left side of the website. People have been making a lot of money with these types of sites,but I know of 3 people making well over $500+ a day...that have had their Adsense publishers accounts terminated by Google in the last 3 weeks...for this exact same thing.

Best,
Dan

[Gordon]

Dan - It would take a very strict interpretation of their TOS for this site to get banned. It is a content site - with decent, legitimate content - nothing wrong with that. It isn't a 2 page MFA (made for adsense) site - the kind that is getting banned...

Just because a site doesn't "do" (sell) anything doesn't mean it isn't a decent site.

[Jason]

Sounds like we need a contest: a turning-test for these kinds of websites. If you can't tell it's MFA (or nearly), then it *is* a "real" website. Maybe with one rule: you only get 5 clicks to make the determination...

***FS*** Ha! Good idea :)

[Snoopy]

The quality of the content looks on the low side to me. I have doubts that sites such as these will rank well long term. The prominant examples eventually seem to get shot down by google, all those geosign sites, property.com etc.

The big question for the short term is, does the increase in traffic make up for the likely big drop in CTR?

***FS*** Beyond SE rank.. I think sites like these are good enough that their own powerful generic name (and type-in traffic) has the ability to build some stream of return visits outside of the search-engine band. Probably a short term drop in CTR.. but we all gotta make sacrifices ;)

[IPTV]

Hi,

I think it's a "decent site" more than decent...still does not matter...just because its and "upgraded" verision of the old made of adsense sites, does not change the fact that this site has been made with one objective...make revenue from adsense.

The 3 people I mentioned in my post above are pros at this...And I would put their "content sites" up agianst this site any day of the week as far as a quality.

Like I said, These quality sites are hard for Google to detect...but one needs to be aware that you can wake up one morning after making $800 a day for 8 months...and find yourself making $80 a day or nothing if Google detects a network of sites you are running.

Mult Ip's different C blocks can help...but one still has to understand the downside risk to this type of monitization.

Best,
Dan

***FS*** Thanks Danno.

[IPTV]

Don't get me wrong... I am all for sites like this...I have no problem with them and own a few myself.

Google index's my sites all by themselves. I do not force Google to index my websites...So the way I see it, its Googles problem if they do not like a website of mine.

I am just saying...That "once again".. people using this method are at the mercy of Google when it comes right down to it, and I do not think anyone should be making "long term" plans as long as this is the case.

As for making a site like this for "type in" traffic...I think it makes sense if you have enough traffic. If so, I would put a "no follow, no index" and try and fly way below the radar.

Best,
Dan

[Leon]

"This morning I was in line at the bank in Cayman"

in line at the bank? don't you own the bank?

***FS*** Ha ha .. I'm a man of the people. Sometimes when I travel alone I fly coach .. shhh :)

[Edwin Hayward]

It's still just a prettier version of an ad.

Here's the problem: if your starting point is a "normal" domain parking page, the site you highlighted looks fantastic. Indeed, it is a step in the "right" direction...

If your starting point is a rich content site with a loyal coterie of repeat visitors who come back on the merits of the information they learn from the site, and which was built to inform/educate/entertain/etc primarily, with ads as an "afterthought" i.e. where the content is primary and the ads, no matter how elegantly integrated, are secondary, then it looks pretty poor. Better than a standard parking page, but still pretty poor.

As Dan already mentioned, the site takes you around and around in circles, in that the only way you can "leave" it is via an ad, no matter how many links you follow. As such, it's easily detectable as a made-for-adsense site if Google decides on a manual review.

That Google is penalizing such sites is fact. Of course, there are millions of them out there and even Google isn't omniscient, so some networks of M-f-A sites fly under the radar for years, and some may never get around to being noticed... but it's still a tightrope journey every single day and you could find your revenue drop literally to $0 overnight at any time, without warning.

Once you've stepped way beyond a simple parking page, you HAVE to start playing by Google and Yahoo's rules, since when it comes to contextual in-content ads, they're really the only two games in town.

***FS*** Interesting take Edwin.. thank-you.

[Robert]

I agree with most of the above. The site *looks* good and in general, you can see the effort that was placed in trying to realign with... Google. But, in my view, it is a generation or two too late. For example, metas and titles are not really descriptive. There is no robots.txt file, there are no 301 redirects from the home page (www or non-www) to prevent duplication issues and aside the proper resolution of the 404s, there is little for search engines to get excited about. The real danger is that if too many such sites try to get indexed they may lose the one powerful attribute that they naturally carry: keywords in domain, by Google demoding such advantage.

Clearly, the site wasn't done by a passionate rims fan working in the basement. To those familiar with adsense it will just be a more sophisticated page with a twist (the forms). A site like this may have a harder time garnering backlinks which will affect its longterm stability. One more thing that is a plus, is the *real* attempt to list those who ARE related to the field, which brings the site closer to what users would expect (solutions to their needs as opposed to links where this can be found).

Excuse my lack of experience in domaining, but with a potent name as this I would have considered setting up a simple store (I know, a lot more work), contacting 3 or 4 medium providers and agreeing in terms and sales conditions, setting up a forum and paying 2 or 3 knowledgeable guys to discuss issues pertaining to custom cars, custom wheels (bikes included) and get on board other alternative biz's (tattoos comes to mind) to really make "customswheels" come alive! Not the only way to play the G game, but...

Everyone trying to improve monetization of sites while providing a more comprehensive *service* (that is what is all about, in the end) should be supported by the community (with ideas and such).

Bravo, Sahar!

[Gordon]

"Mult Ip's different C blocks can help."

Unless you have 10 different google accounts (which some people probably do, but it is a lot harder to do than you'd think) you won't be worrying about IP's and c blocks. All your sites are on the same account.

Google knows that right now I have adsense on 20+ sites because the same exact code is on those 20+ sites.

[IPTV]

Hi Edwin,

It does take much to get ne started about google and yahoo being the only game in town.

I only have about 4 major goals in life and one of them is to get people to see how absolutely 'backward' and 'absurd' it is for us to be 'subservent' to Google with OUR Internet property Assets and Income.

I will leave it there for now...otherwise I will be up all night....LOL

I got started a bit in this thread:

http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/domains-in-seo-.html#comments

Best,
Dan

[Edwin Hayward]

Dan, Google and Yahoo are the only contextual ad players of any note. There are of course thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs out there, many of which may match a particular site's audience better than the ads that either the big G or the big Y can serve up... but unless a 3rd company is going to build the depth of advertisers that G and Y have accumulated, they're pretty much the only choice when it comes to install-and-forget adspace that takes care of its own targetting without site-owner intervention.

Sure, there are companies such as Adbrite, etc. as well as the 2nd tier search/ppc outfits, but their contextual offerings don't garner the same raw $.

It may not be a nice reality - it may not even be an acceptable reality - but it is THE reality facing webmasters (as opposed to domainers) trying to find monetization options in 2007.

Take G and Y out of the picture, and you're left with affiliate programs (fantastic if you can find perfect fits for your traffic and demographic, pretty much irrelevant otherwise) and direct ad sales. Both can work - indeed, very well - but both are Work whereas G and Y take care of the heavy lifting themselves.

Ideally, a mix of affiliate, contextual and direct ads will likely provide the highest income potential for a destination site.

[IPTV]

Hi Edwin,

Thanks for the reply...I am not so much concerned with contextual ads and affiliate programs etc... God bless'em (well not so much adsense..LOL) But affiliate programs are great.

(SEO experts are going to want and kill me for this one)

But what I am really getting at ...

Is that websites should be ALL about the "content" and should NOT have to be SEO'ed.

The current SE's have taken 'control' of the value of domains and reduced most and enhanced a few, but mostly reduced their value down to whatever 'there algorithm' is going to value it at any moment in time.

It may decided its of great value one day and rank you very high...the same day next month, they may have penalized you for something and your site ranks poorly.

Sometimes, the difference in a couple a spots in a SE, can make or break your business.

My whole point is, if you have the domain/website seo.com, and its a legit business in this area, you should not have to...SEO this website, get backlinks, wait until Google assigns you 'page rank' to be listed in the #1 spot for the keyword search seo.

And this is the way it should be. That's what part of a domain address is for...(to describe the content or topic of a website..among other things) IMHO

Type 'seo' into google right now...and the first two spots are taken by 'wikipedia' (surprise)

Everyone is going to ask:

How in the world would someone be able to have a SE that would be able to actually rank search results by domain names and 'insure' that all the domains are great quality websites with real information and are being used properly?

Answer: not has hard as one would think this would be.

Keyword searches and domain names should not be apart. SEO'ers and domainer's should not be apart.

People with a quality website and a great keyword domain to match that website, should be ranked #1 in Google for that search term, without jumping through hoops everyday for the next 20 years...wondering if this is going to be the day my income drops 72.1% beacuse Googles 'algorithm' decided for some reason my website was no longer worthy of ranking on top. That, quite frankly is BS.

As domain/website owners we should not have to worry what the next day is going to bring to our SE rankings...nor should would have to pay an "expert" to do the worrying for us.

Googles not going change their business model...Think about it, Google makes its living off every domain/website owner's assets and work. Goggles is basicly just one big "scrapper site".

We have given Google way to much control...(Yes...we gave it to them...and if we gave it to them, we can take it away)

So I say... "unite" and take back what we have given to this SE's.

More later...I am starting to get worked up...LOL

Peace,
Dan

BTW: The last couple lines are pretty corny...and I do not talk this way... But for love of humanity...please look at Google differently...LOL

[Rob]

I can't see why a site like this would be banned by adsense, it has content articles related to custom rims. It's an information site that probably gets decent type in traffic - so good quality visitors. I think of MFA sites as sites that just have the ads, or gibberish words and paragraphs that contain nothing more than keywords. These pages are usually on domains like www.home-loans-really-cheap-rates.com that have no chance of type in traffic, so traffic probably comes forced from dubious sources that are cheap and low quality, which is why those sites should not qualify for adsense. CustomRims.com would be a domain that would qualify for adsense for domains, in which case it could just show a bunch of links anyway. I can't see anything wrong with this site, and I agree it's the way parking should go if it has decent quality content related to the domain.

[btothec]

Quote from Dan --
"My whole point is, if you have the domain/website seo.com, and its a legit business in this area, you should not have to...SEO this website, get backlinks, wait until Google assigns you 'page rank' to be listed in the #1 spot for the keyword search seo."

Dan --

Problem is this -- CustomWheels.com has a lot of content on it, has a lot of pictures, looks like a real site for all intent. In all reality there is nothing on the site that is of value to a person that wants to buy a set of "Custom Wheels". Now search google for "Custom Wheels" and you will see "Customwheel.com" as the number one search listing. This site does not have as many words as the MFA site but is way more relevant and by god you can actually buy a set of custom rims. I know you think that if you own "domainname.com" and someone that searches for "domain name" should be yours, but the "algorithm" they use has actually given me the user a better experience as they have blocked the site that really has nothing to offer.

B