Well, here's the latest in my domain parking saga.
On Saturday, February 19th, 2005, I emailed Domain Hop (DH) because one of my domains--
www.jobless.ws--had earned $2.74 in one day. No big deal, right? But, you see, this domain had earned this even though it hadn't gotten around to parking it @ Domain Hop; the domain name was still resolving to my own server. Visitors were reaching the
www.jobless.ws parked page via my other domains' parked pages (with DH you can set up your parking template to display links to your other Domain Hop parked domains, basically giving you the power to cross-promote your parked domains.) I found this very curious and decided to contact Domain Hop about it because I had a feeling that the income earned by the domain name was ill gotten because the domain wasn't resolving to DH at the time. I thought that if I contacted them about it right away and explained the situation then they would understand that I was not trying to cheat their system. So that's exactly what I did: I sent the email then quickly set the name servers for
www.jobless.ws to Domain Hop's name servers.
DH customer support doesn't operate on weekends so I had to wait until this morning for a response: Here's the content of the email I received from DH:
Normally, unique internet users do not know which domains out of the
millions/billions that are in existence are ones parked specifically to
you, and your account at Domain hop, and since your name does not show
while receiving the feeds, regular computer users arriving at your site
would not have the ability to foresee two or more unrelated URLs (with
different services implied in their names).
However, your traffic came from the same users clicking on links for
multiple URLs on your account. This pattern of traffic could only come
from sources that knew which URLs did belong to you. From our side, we
have to treat this as incentivized clicks and in the case of your log
ins, self clicks- not unique traffic to our advertisers and must keep
the account inactive as a result until these are removed from payout
totals and prevented from happening in the future.
Shortly after reading this response, I checked one of my DH parked domains and my browser returned the plain text message, "domain is inactive." My account had been deactivated! Let me clear things up some more here.
The above email response had nothing to do with my domain name
www.jobless.ws. It was about certain domains which I had "incentivized." You see, I was impressed with the quality of the ads displayed on certain DH parked domains like
www.BrideUSA.net and
www.GayUSA.us, so impressed that I had placed text links pointing to these DH parked domains on many of my other websites. My thinking was that this would be a great way to maximize my DH revenue! Well, it turns out that it was the perfect way to get banned from DH. I had read their terms of service and my understanding was that you can't solicit clicks--in other words you can't ask people to "click here for some great wedding links." That is what I understood as "incentivizing." This is how it works with
Google's AdSense program and I think that it's perfectly reasonable. But I hadn't done that. I simply placed text links on some of my other websites, i.e. if I found the word "gay" or "lesbian" in the pages of my other sites, I would convert the plain text word into a hyperlink, like this:
Gay.
So, that's the story. My DH account has been suspended. In my final email to DH, I ended with this:
As for the $29.04 that has so far been earned on my account, I will assume--judging by what has been inferred in your emails--that Domain Hop will be keeping this money. That is fine with me as I consider it payment for teaching me a valuable lesson in the domain parking game.
So, here's a parking summary for me so far:
--Custom Parked Pages with AdSense ads?
> I have been asked to removed the ads from a number of pages but I haven't been banned. Bottom line is you have to offer some useful content on your pages if you want to use
AdSense--Domain Sponsor?
> Application rejected!
--Domain Hop?
> Account suspended for "incentivized" links to parked pages.
--SEDO parking?
> Not interested. Earning are simply not worth it (for the domains I tested anyway.)
All the domains that had their name server configuration set to DH are now set back to my own server and the custom parked pages that I had created for them before I joined DH should be showing on those domains by this evening. On a positive note: I now have a pretty good understanding of what the AdSense editors don't want to see on my sites so I should be just fine with my current setup.
AdSense is cool. I've had a few disagreements with them over the content of some of my pages; they've asked me to remove the AdSense code from certain sites I own (I have always complied) but they've never threatened to ban me from their program. I never have and never will try to cheat and I hope I can have a long relationship with the program. So far, it's been the most stable, consistent and reasonable revenue program I've experienced.
As for DH: learn from my mistakes. No incentivized links! You'll get banned and they'll keep your money! "Cheating" to most people means clicking ads on your own pages. I don't do that and never will. To do so would be plain stupid because it is very easy to detect this sort of cheating. However, in the case of DH, my simple text hyperlinks got my account suspended. You see, most of my sites are interlinked. Linking my sites together makes perfect sense to me from a promotional point of view. If someone visits one of my domains, why not provide them with links to the other lovely domains I have to offer? Not linking my sites together would be wasteful and, well, stupid. When I moved a few test domains to DH to try their domain parking, there were still links to these test domains on my other sites. Cheating? I don't think so. In fact, Domain Hop does the same exact thing! If you have multiple domains parked with DH, you can configure your templates to display your other DH parked domains. Makes perfect sense. That's all I was doing, and it got me suspended.
That's all for now. More updates on my domain parking saga soon! Thanks for reading.
