GoDaddy is under fire this week, and not for its racy ad campaigns featuring Danika Patrick. A class action lawsuit has been filed in the Federal courts of both Phoenix and Arkansas.
The lawsuit is in regard to the web hosting company’s practice of featuring PPC ads on placement pages. What are placement pages, you ask? They are the temporary placeholders that are automatically erected when a domain has been purchased but server has not been selected and the website has not yet been published. Apparently the problem being argued is that domain owners have paid for the ads but GoDaddy is keeping the revenues earned from the PPC ads under those domains. To be fair, this practice is not unique to GoDaddy. Many domain registrars will place ads on placeholder pages without permission or consideration of the actual domain owners.
From my perspective, the fact that domain registrars are retaining PPC ad revenues derived from placeholder pages is only a very minuscule part of the issue. I have purchased many (many, many, many) domains and it really burns my toast to see those PPC ads on my placeholder page. Why? Two reasons:
- I did not grant permission to have ads placed on my page and I have no way of removing them from the actual place holder page.
- The ads are generated based on keyword matching. This means that, in most cases, those ads are driving traffic to my competitors before I have even had a chance to put up my website!
In other words, if my url is something like fluffydogbeds.com, the ads that will be auto generated on my place card page will likely link to dog bed competitors. So it is not just a few pennies I am missing out on! My temporary page could be driving traffic to my major competition, jumpstarting new relationships between those jerks and my unsuspecting potential fan base! Ouch.
So how do you combat this? Well folks, as I tell my new website design clients, it is important to act fast after you have established your url. Before you start to build your site, choose a host company and add an under construction page. And not a cheezy “under construction” page featuring hairy spider spinning a web under a banner that says “Still Spinning! Keep Crawling!” But I will go off on that tangent in my next blog post.
Want to learn more about the GoDaddy lawsuit? Go here: Class Action Filed Against GoDaddy For PPC Ads on Placeholder Pages.
Homer and Bart image found here.