Hi guys,
I've always said that we wanted to provide parking for grown-ups, meaning that we trust all of our customers to abide by our and Google's terms of what traffic is allowed on a parked domain. They basically specify that traffic has to be "natural" from real people who want to be on that domain or thereabouts out of their own volition.
However, where there is a parking company, there are people who will try to exploit it to their own ends with no mercy. It seems that we were too trusting with too many of our customers and they exploited the system like only fakers know how. Google got pretty miffed as, because of these people, we lose money, Google lose money, Google's advertisers lose money, our decent customers lose money and the PPC industry as a whole loses money and integrity.
As a result, we needed to display more prominently exactly what is and isn't allowed. We obviously have to use our discretion here.
So to answer your specific questions:
Links to your pages from forums: Officially, you are not allowed to do this, but as I said, discretion can be used. For example, if you link to three of your names in your signature at the bottom of posts in a forum such as this one with quality members who respect the industry, we have no problem with that as we know that the parking-savvy people here won't click all over the ads. If someone says 'what does a ND page look like?' of course, you can link to it - I've done it enough times!
If they are listed in a 'How to cheat PPC forum' with 'Click these links', then it's a different matter. You would be surprised by how much traffic can be generated by 'honest' hyperlinks in the hands of the wrong people. There are some areas of the world where this is so prevalant that every 'webmaster' or interenet surfer who sees links to a parked page clicks on them and clicks the page out of 'solidarity' for other domain parkers in the understanding it's a reciprical agreement. This can generate thousands of dollars a month in fake revenue.
Backlinks etc. The original text says 'existing search engine results'. Basically, a page that is parked is not allowed to be SEO-ed, advertised or promoted to drive traffic to it. The traffic has to be 'natural' - i.e. existing or inherant, so backlinks are exactly what should be present, Ratboy.
As I say, I have no doubt that all of our customers from this forum abide by the rules as the UK is, thankfully, currently outside of the scope of most fakers for the most part. Our concern is cases such as 15 letter hyphenated .info domains with 1,000 visitors a day and no apparent reason for it.
With thousands of customers, we have to be tough to ensure that NameDrive, Google, the industry and our own customers are protected from the damage that these people do. There are a significant number of people who make a great deal of money hopping from one parking company to another until they are kicked out and move on...
Phew. Haven't done a long post for ages.
Ed
