I found this article about Googles shady side of doing business. The article is from December last year so I don't know if you've seen it or not. Quite interesting is "The scheme was traced to Unasi Inc., a company registered in Panama. Almost all of the misspelled URLs found are parked with Oingo.com, a domain parking server owned by Google Inc." "More than two months after Finnish anti-virus specialist F-Secure Corp. complained that it was a favorite target of the typo-squatters, the fake sites are still up and running and serving Google ads." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1903695,00.asp
And google wonders why people are beginning to turn against them. The part about children sites and adult content/porn is particularly disturbing.
I think a member here was told misspelled words in adwords were not allowed. That the practice was "evil" so to speak. What Irony!
Even if they were, they probably couldn't tell us cause it's part of the secret and sacred "algo". So either way, they are covered.
Are we looking for conspiracies or something? Google is a huge and reputable company. While it is possible, it's not generally something that big companies with serious incomes and serious money really have the time to mess with... It's small folks like us who have all the time in the world and anonymity that go out and raise havoc on the world night and day!
From 35 million domains registered in April 32 million were part of domain kiting schemes. Read this.
With folks in the world pulling stuff like this, it is no wonder that honest people have to live in a Google "sandbox" for so long just to be recognized in the search results as legitimate. I believe this kind of activity is what is behind the delay in new websites getting into the regular results. Sort of like a "probationary" period. Oh well, that’s just the world we live in these days and I guess we will just have to get use to it.
Verisign had their own system for awhile to get visitors from non-registered domains as well. Here is a petition that explains what they were doing and put pressure on them to stop. 'Domain kiting' is very similar, and explains why Verisign could seem to care less about this practice.
Thanks very much for posting this info. Certainly opened my eyes! I'm guessing the Soccer World Cup is also spawning a lot of stuff right now.
Why are they making this seem like a crime? They said that the 'typo-squatters' are 'stealing traffic' from popular internet brands. They're not stealing traffic, people are typing in their domains which they registered legally.
Anyone mispelling your domain name will be pointed to these sites. Certainly if not illegal is unethical, as the user would have realized their mistake and corrected it. In addition they are 'locking' domain names without paying. These domain names should be available to people who may want to register them and I am not talking about the mispelled domain names. They are also locking millions of domain name permutations. It is actually hard to find good domain names these days without buying them from the after-market. Since they legally 'own' the domain names for the three days, they are also manipulating that.