jmccormac - 2:53 pm on Mar 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

There's a lot of that happening and not just in the domain name parking side of things. I'm currently building an Irish web directory/Irish search engine and have been analysing Irish websites by category and also by timeline indicators such as Last-Modified and other cues (there are about 300K sites in the set). Some sites have not been updated for years and have old timeline indicators (book now for Spring 2009 etc) in the body text. There was a similar issue with the .co and .eu surveys (approx 2.5 million sites in all). The 1 year update percentage (sites that have not been updated or changed in a year based on comparing historical snapshots with the current website snapshot) was about 23% on the Irish sites set.

The high profile domain parkers tend to keep the contact details current but there are many small scale domainers and web developers who register domains and then leave them on their registrar or hoster's PPC landing pages and forget about them. It is easy enough to detect PPC sites but the small web developer sites tend to take the most time for categorisation.

This is what the hosting history of the domain looked like:
SERVE.CO.UK DOMAINCONTROL.COM October 2008 2008-11-01 Transfer
SERVE.NET.UK DOMAINCONTROL.COM October 2008 2008-11-01 Transfer

SERVE.CO.UK February 2002 2002-03-01 New
SERVE.NET.UK February 2002 2002-03-01 New

MYDOMAIN.COM September-October 2001 2001-11-04 Deleted
MYDOMAIN.COM August 2001 2001-09-01 New

ONESTOP.NET May 2001 2001-06-09 Deleted
SHOPPINGART.COM May 2001 2001-06-09 Deleted

ONESTOP.NET December 2000 Epoch
SHOPPINGART.COM December 2000 Epoch

Perhaps somebody had plans for it back in the DotBomb era but it was dropped like millions of other domains about then.

It has had history in com/net/org/biz/info/co.uk over the years (well since 2000 anyway).

Regards...jmcc