Homes For Rent Google Arbitrage

In the past, domain purchasing companies would buy a domain like homesforrent.com and serve content related ads. These sites have served a purpose by redirecting people to hopefully a legitimate site for rentals. Google even encourages serving ads on parked pages to drive more clicks and users to their final destination.

However, I see a user experience problem trending upward. All great domains like homesforrent.com are taken and now we are seeing domains like House4Rent.TopMatches.net being acquired as sites.

When a user goes to Google and searches for “homes for rent in denver” here are some of the paid results they see:

As you can see, House4Rent.TopMatches.net is paying to show up for the keyword “homes for rent denver.” Now when you click on that link it takes you to a parked page with more rental ads. See below:

Now, the third sponsored listing is pronto.com. If you click on this link it takes you to a shopping site that has no rentals at all but of course has more ads:

This user has visited 3 separate sites and still has not found what they were looking for. Do you think this is a good user experience?

There are still an overwhelming amount of people who type www.homesforrent.com or chocalate.com, etc directly into their browser. I think there is value there for users who type URLs into the browser, go to one of these sites and clicks on a paid link to find houses for rent or real chocolate.

However, if an advertiser arbitrages on Google, and then sends users to another arbitrager, this is a serious user experience problem. I cannot solve the problem to this issue nor do I want to. Heck, just because I think there is a problem, doesn’t mean there is.