One of Google’s great strengths is that it is an engineering-led company. It’s also one of its great weaknesses, however, because software engineers are not always the best at designing things that can be used by non-geeks. That’s exactly what I thought of AdSense for Domains up until now. Last Friday, though, they finally fixed it.

Normally, you see, when you park domains with a company in order to make money from type-in traffic or residual search engine traffic (due mostly to incoming links to a domain that was previously owned by someone else), the parking company makes it really easy to do the parking. There are essentially two steps: (1) you register your domain with the company and (2) you use the parking company’s nameservers for the domain. Easy-peasy.

Not if you’re Google, though. You couldn’t just set the nameservers, you actually had to go and modify your DNS (domain name service) records by hand, hopefully without screwing it up. It was complicated, complicated enough that Google even gave you detailed directions for several of the big hosting services — because, of course, everyone has a different web interface for managing DNS entries.

Someone finally clued into the fact that no one really wants to go to all that trouble. Sure, there are some advantages to managing the DNS yourself, but they’re pretty minor and most customers wouldn’t be interested in them. Now, though, you can simply modify your nameserver settings and be done with it. The old way’s still available if you need to be a geek, but the new way is so much simpler. Thanks, Google, for doing this.

Be sure to read 10 Ways To Benefit From Your Surplus Domains for more ideas about what to do with those domains you have sitting around collecting dust.