Want to test sites on parking on temporary basis without SE negativity

[trader]

So we want to test some small developed websites on parking for maybe 1 or 2 days a week for several weeks and see if the site can make good PPC revenue while parked.

After changing the DNS to the parking firm we would change it back to its website nameservers after say 24 to 48-hours.

Don't want to keep it on the parked page for too long as we don't want the search engines to classify the page as being parked so it can keep it SEO and Page Rank, and also not damage its traffic.

Is this safe to do and if so what is the maximum frequency or length of time it can be parked before the SEs may classify it as a parked page?

[tedster]

I'd say it's not safe at all.

You clearly know enough about the topic to appreciate that Google does not want to return a parked domain. They are going to see what you're doing and then you will no longer rank.

[trader]

We are thinking if the SE bots usually visit the domain a number of times (I assume spread out over X number of days) before permanently updating status from a developed site to a parked page, by the time it gets to that point on the next spidering it would discover it's no longer parked so no harm would be done. Is that a possibility?

After looking at the parking firm stats we may not want to park the domain full-time because it may not make much revenue parked. Can you suggest a better way to test this? Thanks for your feedback.

[tedster]

No, I personally wouldn't get near any such plans. Either park it or run a website.

[netmeg]

There was a time when you could have done this fairly safely, but not in 2012.

[ergophobe]

So let's say you have a super secret telescope that can see the Googlebot coming and change your DNS as needed so G never sees the parked site. What have you actually tested at that point?

You're testing PPC revenue on a parked site that is still listed in Google and getting organic search, not just type-in traffic. But since that can't endure as a long-term solution, it's hard for me to see what useful data you would get from that test.

[Simsi]

Agree totally with the above responses but just to add another observation: I've bought a lot of domains down the years (sometimes costing $'000s) for both my own and other's development projects but one of my criteria is never, ever go near any domain that has been PPC parked, no matter how good the domain.

They are much harder to rank once they've been through that in my experience, even with change of owners/servers etc (even tried reconsideration requests once or twice). PPC Parking = Poison. Actually, it's a bit like asking for a manual penalty :-)

[trader]

Thanks for the feeeback everyone, and very good points from ergophobe.