July 18, 2008

Google in trouble over parked domains

If you have ever found a parked domain, have you noticed the Google Adwords on the page?

This has become the basis of an accusation from a law firm in California; they have been paying the site to be promoted through the search engines scheme. Only to find that instead of the adverts appearing on popular sites, they were in fact being shown on pages with errors or on parked domains.

Hal Levitte owns the law firm in question; he intends to file a federal lawsuit against Google with a view of making it a class action. This is where every person with an Adwords account in the US for the past four years could join the case providing that it is possible to prove that his or her ads appeared on a parked domain or error page.

If the courts allow this to go ahead then it could mean one of the largest cases of this kind and would certainly have a detrimental effect on Google.

Source [Ars Technica]