Parking - what's the damage?

What risks are there with parking say 1000 domains

[TinkyWinky]

I have over 1500 UK domains that I have caught when they dropped and want to park somewhere whilst I wait to develop a good number of them with small minisites.

Obviously some of them will have had previous IBL's and some will have type-in traffic too - however, the last thing i want is to 'damage' the domain, have the pr removed or worse have G ban and therefore mean I have to do a reinclude on the domain when I do develop.

Anyone got experiences of successful parking?

Is using robots.txt or adding a single page of html and content a good way to keep PR and prevent any kind of ban from G?

Is there a parking programme that ensures domain gets back into serps without a ban?

Most of these are great two word .co.uk's that people will type in - so i need to monetise them and also preserve any IBL's that were there before i picked them up.

Cheers
TW

[superclown2]

Parking usually brings in pennies and most people are lucky if they cover their domain renewal costs. If you've bought deleted domains there may be a fair number that are already banned by G, good two-word domains domains are dropped for a reason. You could stop spiders easily with a robots.txt file but you may find that getting the site re-indexed later may be more interesting, I have a .co.uk that I bought as a deleted domain and which, according to the wayback machine, had been blocked by robots.txt since 2006 and despite me getting a stack of IBLs it's doing zilch six months later even though it's being crawled regularly.

[webboy1]

I think you firstly have to make a clear decision on whether you want to monetise or not. I would suggest that NO parking provider will guarantee your domains inclusion back in the SEs one you've finished parking them. Parking providers have no control over how Google handles listings and therefor cannot do anything about it. The parking providers job is to monetise the domain ... and thats what they do.

However, I'd suggest a different way of looking at it. That is, that it's not in the parking providers interest to have the domain kicked out of Google because it's not just you who will stop earning money on it. So will they. So I expect they take SE rankings / performance into account when generating their parking templates.

As for as what to do ... I'd monetise. We have thousands of domains currently parked across various types of accounts and, while I cannot checked every domain, I haven't seen any that have disappeared from Google. Of course they have dropped down the listings, but thats to be expected from what are now essentially one page sites.

Google ranks on quality, relevance and optimisation of content on websites. Neither parking, redirecting or using a robots.txt file can replace an actual quality site.

The benefits of parking are good as long as the domains make money. Parking also makes it easier to tout domains for sale, where you could make quite a bit of profit if the domains are really of the quality you describe.

I agree with the response above to an extent. Parking can be hit and miss and for every 1 domain that makes good money, there are hundreds, if not thousands, that make £0 - but you'll never know unless you try. As for not covering costs, well, you might find that those from your 1500 that do generate revenue cover the costs of those that don't. We've found that domain parking is a great example of the famous 80 / 20 rule i.e. 20% of the domains make 80% of the revenue. The remaining 80% of domains only account for the remaining 20% of revenue generated.

As for good two word domains being dropped for a reason, we actually find quite often that the reason is no more than a lack of knowledge about the domain market on the part of the previous owner. While we are well versed in the domaining world, most domain owners (and I know from extensive experience working along side registries) are NOT aware of the domain after market and monetisation. They simply see it as not having to spend money to renew the domain, rather than an opportunity to earn additional revenue.

[superclown2]

Did you check if the sites had any history before you bought them? The overwhelming majority of .uk sites that have been dropped over the last few years have never been hosted so no website in the past means no backlinks which then means no organic traffic or PR to worry about in the first place. Type-in traffic is a nice theory but in practice you'd need really good domains to get any reward from it. Then again if they are REALLY good you may be better trying to sell them individually. They'd probably fetch more with a good website and a bit of PR though and having them on a standard parking site wouldn't help that. Personally I buy a lot, like a lot of domains and I check them all out thoroughly but I reject most of the sites that have been parked because they inevitably pick up relevance for the terms that the parking company (or rather the parking company's script) has picked for them rather than the ones I would have in mind and it takes ages to shake that effect off.

[Insomniak]

The parking place I used (not sure if I can mention the name, its one of the biggest) lets you pick your own keywords. I parked some new domains last year that got PR 0 or 1 and were ready to go when I finally got sites up on them this year. Maybe I misunderstood the questions but parking probably helped me if anything.

[Webwork]

A fairly authoritative source indicated that parking isn't a "bad thing", per se - like a permanent stain - but that development clearly has an advantage over parking. ;)

With the improvement in parking company offerings - such as landers that look less like landers, keyword optimization tools, etc. - parking isn't as bad a thing today as it was a few years back, when all landers were these generic things that also spawned a bazillion pop-ups.

Today, I take it as somewhat a sign of desperation (or worse) when someone enables their portfolio's domains to employ the optional "pop-ups" choice. Pop-ups will never endear anyone to direct navigation.

[edited by: Webwork at 1:42 am (utc) on Feb. 27, 2008]

[TinkyWinky]

Thanks for all wise words..... i have a lot to think over - especially where i want to place the domains...

Did you check if the sites had any history before you bought them?

Some do some don't... I can't put them here but we are talking celeb domains (firstname - lastname /co /uk), 2 word combo's (sports - shoes / co / uk etc) that have more than 10k+ searches per month for that exact phrase in the UK market and some generics - so quite a mix.

The idea is actually to develop all the premium and first tier sites to proviude income and more value for sale, and then to sell all 2nd/3rd tier on to end-users depending on their 'value'. Where value includes keywords, traffic, search engine presence, vertical, etc.

Hence my question regarding having them parked as a way to get them back into the SERPs but not banned if at all possible (I realise they can be requested for reinclusion of course :) ) so i can also make a few pounds per month to pay hosting etc and beer money ;)

Pop-ups

No chance.... I hate them too so would not subject anyone else to them!

good two-word domains are dropped for a reason

You'd be surprised! In the UK the market is almost saturated for dropcatching - but domains fall for a number of reasons...

i. Employee leaves, but they registered their details (not companies) as the contact
ii. Company owns .com and was pointing .co.uk into the .com - if all their activity takes place from .com - then easily missed
iii. Stupidity
iv. Changing email address!

For example I have picked up some domains that are PR6 and have 5,000+ uniques per month - simply cos some numpty company forgot to check whether they were the legal owner :)