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:
