Domain parking has become big business with companies profiting from both buying domain names that have expired and from completely newly registered domains. Google has now entered the market. Thousands of domains are being registered every year by domain name squatters, with cybersquatters and typosquatters having recognized the business opportunities albeit morally unsound and now being prosecuted on far more frequent basis.

Google Adsense for Domains has developed an algorithm to eliminate those sites that are unlikely to attract enough clicks to be profitable for Google. There’s also hope that this algorithm will weed out many of the illegal domain owners impersonating some of the most popular names.

Google’s mantra when it first introduced its Google domain parking service was to essentially do away with the middleman. Since then, as all services do, it has evolved and now applies a Google domain parking algorithm to each domain name, evaluating its potential to the possibility of searches related to the domain names content before accepting the domain for parking. As with all other domain parking, the domain website is solely filled with links which, according to the law of averages, the visitor will click on to navigate their way to a site relevant to their search. When a visitor clicks on an advertising click the request is received by Google and processed, interpreting the HTML or XML with which the page is formatted and returns the requested page to the visitor.

Due to the predominance of commercial links, Google search engine results tend to return low rankings for those domains that use Google domain parking. However, despite these diminutive ratings, Google domain parking requires that each domain that is put forward for inclusion in their parking service attracts a minimum of 750,000 page views every month. One thing that Google domain parking services do encourage is the ‘domain tasting’ idea which, in effect, is an open invitation to cybersquatter to earn money without being penalized.

This ‘domain tasting’ works by domain owners seting up their domain pages and allowing advertisements to run on them. The cybersquatter can then remove any domains within a 5 day period to be refunded in full and keep 100% of the revenue their sites may have generated during that time. Undoubtedly this is a win-win situation for the cybersquatter. It can also work to the advantage of the genuine domain owner who wants to try out various domain names to see which ones are likely to generate sufficient clicks to make them a feasible income per month.

To illustrate this point, if a domain owner has 100 sites bulk-registered and, out of these, just 1% of them generate sufficient click-through traffic within 5 days to make these sites financially viable, the other 99% can be deleted in accordance with Googles refund policy. The domain owner will be refunded in full for those sites that are deleted, so will have had a chance to try them and see if they attract a click-through rate knowing they are not going to lose anything for trying. Again, for genuine domain owners, this is a win-win situation.