Publishing 2.0 charges ‘Hypocrisy in Google’s User Experience Policies’, after juxtaposing Google’s penalization of AdWords advertisers for low quality landing pages and its simultaneous advocation of parked pages among AdSense users.
Publishing 2.0: Explain this — Google is penalizing AdWords advertisers “who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages,” and yet Google just signed a deal with GoDaddy.com to run AdSense on parked domains (via JenSense):
The program is called CashParking. And the monthly fee is scaled depending on what percentage of GoDaddy’s revenue you want to keep. It is worth noting that GoDaddy is sharing the revenue they earn from Google, so Google will still be earning money from each click on a parked domain page.
Google AdSense for Domains: “allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google’s semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names.”
True enough, if Google assumes that parked pages are ill-advised search results and yet encourages their proliferation it would seem they are hypocrites. But then Google is only thinking of ‘Google user experience’, right? So this would assume Google intends to permit these pages to appear anywhere near the top results. (Most users only view the first page of results.) How likely is that?
To be a hypocrite is to elicit a false positive of good intentions. By that standard Google probably isn’t hypocritical about its commitment to user experience, but just aiming to plug-up someone else’s engine to their own profit. (Although there are adjectives to characterize that too.)