How to auto-detect parked domains

can xenu (or anything else) tell me if a domain is parked

[boozledbam]

I have a directory site and I'm using xenu links sleuth to check that my external links are valid. I would also like to know if a valid link is a parked domain as these are useless to those who click through from my site. Can I do this in xenu or is there anything else I can use to find parked domains. Thanks.

[BenFox]

I'm not aware of anything that can check for parked domains totally automatically.

In theory I suppose you might be able to make a tool using the Majestic or Linkscape API - if you were to be able to compile a list of the sites you link out to and then look at their link metrics you'd probably find that a lot of them have a very similar profile.

I've not heard of an off the shelf solution for this but would love to hear if there is one.

[OMZen]

Not aware of any off the shelf solution indeed.

But all the parked pages have two common strings - "Sponsored Listings" and "Related Searches". So you can write a bot ( or get written from any freelancing forum ) which would crawl all the outbound url's from your directory and return those who have both of the above strings in their body content.

[piatkow]

The best check is the human eye. When I ran a site that was heavy on links tagged each link with its last review date and tried to look at every one every year, in practice it was every two years.

Its not just parked pages, domains can be re-used very quickly and sometimes sites just get forgotten while the owner happily pays the credit card bills for auto renewal.

[OMZen]

@piatkow, agree @ the human eye, but it's not always scalable. Especially, when you are handling multiple websites :)

[piatkow]

but it's not always scalable.

Agreed, I was trying to cope with a directory with around 200 links which was really at the limit if what I could handle manually. The biggest problem wasn't parked domains it was unmaintained sites that were misleadingly out of date.