Link from Parked Page: Is it Good or Bad ?

[PickIt]

I help manage a site for a web hosting company that also does domain registration. They have sold several thousand domains, but the customer has not set up a website for it or pointed the DNS someplace else. So the domain brings up the web hosting company's Parked Page. It simply says "Parked at (Company Name)"; has a few lines advertising their web hosting service, and a link back to the homepage.

The web hosting company is wondering if having the link on a parked page, which is also hosted on their own server, is bad for SEO, or maybe seen as spammy? We are certain that it is not passing any beneficial link juice to their site since Google doesn't give any to Parked Pages, but can this be hurting them? They would like to keep the link on the Parked Page for practical reasons of making it easy for anyone who lands on it to go to their website. I have read about Google penalizing Parked Pages that are filled with ads and links, but this is just one link on their own Parked Page. Any thoughts?

[JD_Toims]

If in doubt, <a rel="nofollow" href="url">, and move on.

[Shai]

We have some premium domains for sale. Around 30 of them. We put a single page with some text relating to the domain name and a for sale banner on each domain. We also had a semi-loaded link to our main site. After the first reconsideration request, google sent us 3 examples of links they still see as unatural. One of those examples was from one of the Domain for sale pages. As JD_Toims said, i would nofollow them.

[JD_Toims]

Oh, wow! I totally forgot [and I don't forget this one very often] -- Welcome to WebmasterWorld PickIt!

[PickIt]

Thanks for the replies. Looks like I'll recommend that they play it safe and 'nofollow' them, so they still can put them on the parked page, but not try to get anything SEO out of them.

@Shai, you mention a reconsideration request. Did your site get penalized? And if so, do you think the links on your 'domains for sale' pages contributed? Did Google accept your reconsideration request? Just curious in how those things work out.

Thanks.

[JD_Toims]

I'm not sure about the "not getting anything SEO" out of nofollowing where nofollow should be used -- Not passing/increasing the PageRank of the linked page is a given, but I'm not 100% sure about "doing things the right way" not being beneficial to SEO.

When I think about sites I would "trust" [algorithimically & trust is part of Google's ranking system] I think a portion of the "trust" I gave a site would be based on it following the guidelines and not trying to manipulate the system(s) in place for rankings, so "lose any possible PageRank passed" sure, but the appropriate use of nofollow "not helping SEO" I'm not so sure about -- I have an idea things may be a bit different in the overall scoring than it seems many think.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm not 100% sure about "doing things the right way" not being beneficial to SEO.

Great point, JDT! It's amazing that many webmasters and "SEOs" still aren't getting this message. SEO is not about sneaking something past Google or taking advantage of some technicality.

I guess it's become a subtle point because people have had the opposite perspective for so long... but it should not be subtle. I'm not saying that PickIt was in any way trying to be sneaky here, btw. It's just that the whole SEO mindset is so obsessed with getting around the rules that it has affected how people talk about things.