lease a subdomain for $$$ - good or bad idea? (6)
Hi,
Hoping to get some advice...
I was recently contacted by a company who wants me to create a subdomain on my domain, and they will lease it from me for the purposes of ad arbitrage (they didn't use those words, but that's what it is: they'll create content pages to monetize with ads from social media; I'm guessing Facebook ads). They'll host the pages (CNAME pointing the subdomain to their servers).
Why? Because of my domain age (14 years old) and because it has decent traffic.
They're offering to pay a rather large amount of money each month, so I'm tempted to say yes.
It's not a domain or website I do very much with; in fact I haven't significantly updated it for many years. But, it still has value.
They claim they won't be doing anything to hurt my website in Google's eyes (page rank, reputation, etc).
Is this a good idea or not?
Have you ever heard of this? I had no idea my old website was worth so much for this purpose.
- David
Looks like it's some loophole how Blackhat SEO's use to rank they content.
However Google seems to be going after it:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...pam-27815.html
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...ers-28059.html
So it depends what is the value of this domain for you, if you don't use and don't plan to use it in the near future (as it's value will just go probably up over time) it might be a way to earn some extra cash.
But if you plan to use this domain and rank in Google in the future, then it's probably a big no as it might get you penalized.
It doesn't appear that the company is trying to rank in Google or SEO the content they're placing on my site. And the content would be related to my existing content, which is pretty whitehat (it's a science/educational type site).
Instead, they'd be running paid ads to pages with ad-arbitrage style content (eg, carousel/slideshow type content surrounded by ads).
But if they're doing paid ads, why would they need an aged domain? Is an aged domain better for paid ads as well?
Perhaps they are not telling you the whole story.
Thanks for the replies Erik.
I just did some additional Google searches and found this:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/advertising/4955753.htm
It's pretty much exactly the same proposal I got. (The company that contacted me was http://vayg.com)
A post someone made in that thread I think is spot on -- except maybe instead of driving cheap clicks, they are sending fake traffic from their own bots. In other words, it's click fraud. They run bot traffic to the pages they place ads on, until my site is blacklisted and/or they bail out before the "onboarding" process is over so I'm never paid.
But, I could be wrong.
No worries man.
Definitely there is something fishing going on + if it looks too good to be true, than it's probably not 
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