Google Never Recommends Parking Domains – Not in Reality

Parked Domains are discouraged by Google, but their official pages display a different story

Matt Cutts answers to questions asked by people in Google’s ‘Webmaster Help Forum’. Now that’s not news, but what happened yesterday is that, instead of Matt selecting a question from the forum list he opted to answer his own question. Probably he intentionally did this to convey a valuable message to webmasters worldwide. 

The question is as below:

                               “I have a parked domain and want to launch a new website on it. Are there any pitfalls I should avoid? Should I keep my domain parked or put some sort of stub page there?”

Matt mentions that they have got a parked domain filter OR detector that prevents these parked pages appearing in Google’s search results. He mentions that if you have your domain parked for a while before launching the actual site (rich with content and links), it takes time for the above mentioned filter to advise Google’s algorithm that the site is no longer ‘parked’. Matt advises users to add a paragraph or more mentioning that this domain will be the future home of XYZ site and mentioning more about the business that is getting ready to kick-start or which already exists. He warns that leaving the domain bare without content, due to lack of business ideas the time you purchase the domain, will end up in the filters detecting your launched website a little later than usual.

What is a Parked Domain?

Parked Domains are additional domains placed without any content by a primary domain, mainly serving advertising purposes. These domains are single-page websites often developed by webmasters for future uses. Or you can also launch a parked domain right before the actual launch of a website. 

Data Refresh

Just a refresh into an old blog post by Google. This was posted back in 2011. As mentioned in this post, one of the search refreshes done by Google was on ‘Parked Domains’ – not to show them anymore in search results.

                           “New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites with little unique content for our users and are often filled only with ads. In most cases, we prefer not to show them.”

The Real Question is this, Matt

See below the screenshot of Google’s support domain page - http://www.google.com/domainpark/index.html.

 It doesn’t make sense when they lead us to a ‘setup instructions page’ and a ‘Help Center’ page (both landing in a single page), which deliberately encourages and fuels creating parked pages. The rule-maker is the rule-breaker here! Will it not apply to Google’s AdSense for Domains, which cheered for parked pages?

Here is the video: