Parked domains?

Sometimes when I search for something on the search engines, I get these pages who are full of text with information on a specific subjetct. Within the text there a some links with keyword anchors. Often these pages have adsense advertising in them.

Are these sites parked domains? Would buying links from their text that fits in with your keyword be beneficial? Is this white-hat seo? How come these pages can be high on the search engines?

Please share experiences and your advice,

thanks

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Generally parked domains are monetized via CPC (you pay them for each click). Therefore there is no SEO advantage to buying links from them because they will all go through a redirect so that they can charge you for the click and the SEs will not see the link to your site.

avoid parking any live domain else it’s for sure you will have to specific it’s ranking & backlinks it may have.
Usually we park brand new domains which are not fully developed to go live…

Just as long as you are not buying the link for SEO purposes since once the site you bought the link from has been removed from the search results the value for SEO purposes of the links on those pages will then be zero.

Of course buying links for SEO has just about zero value anyway. The purpose of buying links is to get real people to see them and not search engines.

Yes, those are ‘monitised’ parked domains. Just Google ‘domain cash parking’.

wow this discussion is above my knowledge…, however the parked domains I was referring to was described and linked by r937 (EX. site-point.com/). However the examples I encountered usually have a lot more text and information with specific keywords anchor links in it that goes to other websites…

I guess if there’s any authority when it comes to DNS definitions ICANN is it.

I host at DreamHost which doesn’t have cPanel. The closest thing to information I could find there was under my Manage Domain tab.

Redirect
(Redirect this domain to another site, changing the browser’s address in the process.)

Mirrored
(Use the same files from a fully hosted site you have at DreamHost, but display them at a different address.)

Parked
(A placeholder web site with a generic DreamHost “coming soon” message.)

Cloaked
(Display the contents of another web site in a frame.)

But I know what the OP is referring to. Some of the links in the old Stickies are “broken” and go to a page loaded with SPAM. I took it that someone bought the domain name specifically for that purpose. That is, the domain isn’t really “parked” by my definition, but the domain is now a SPAM page.

no, no, and once again, no

http://site-point.com/ is ~not~ pointing anywhere else, and it ~is~ a parked domain

actually, the subset is the other way around – ~you~ have chosen to use the cpanel term which ~clearly~ is a subset of all parked domains

oh yes i can

http://site-point.com/ is an example of a parked domain where i ~can~ tell just by looking

let’s wait to see what nahoms has to say, shall we?

No but as one of the most popular domain hosting control panels around there would be more sites using that than any of the alternative places that involve parking domains. There are probably millions of times as many domains using cPanel as are using Sedo.

All of the definitions you have quoted are just a subset of the one I mentioned anyway. Sedo of course defines the subset of parked domains that they are actively providing the service for - that group of parked domains where you specifically park the domain on a third party ad service rather than parking it on your own hosting.

As I said before - all parking a domain means is pointing it at the same place as another domain. Since part of what the OP asked was whether particular donains were parked or not I the definition of what a parked domain actually is so thet they can work it out for themselves.

Of course all of the domains that you said are parked domains are in fact parked since you have decided to use the term only with regard to one small subset rather than its broader meaning.

That 100 best domain names site looks like they either copied the info from Wikipedia or that Wikipedia copied the info from them. Both are secondary sources. In the case of Sedo they specialise in that particular subset of domain parking and so have no reason to mention that it is only a subset of what domain parking means.

Whenever two or more domains point to the same folder without using a redirect it means that all but one of those domains have been parked.

For that matter most of the domain parking ad services are probably using cPanel as the control panel for their hosting and therefore use the cPanel parked domain option to set up all of the domains parked with them.

And to bring it back to the point I was trying to make in my original reply - you can’t tell by looking at a web page whether it is parked or not unless there is some text in the page to tell you.

just because somebody’s wrote an app that includes a definition does not make that definition the only one around, nor does it automatically usurp the generally accepted meaning of the term

see http://www.100best-domain-names.com/articles/domain-parking.html for another definition (since you dislike wikipedia so much)

and here’s another one, a “primary source of information” that you like so much – http://www.sedo.com/uk/park-domains/how-parking-works/?tracked=&partnerid=20293&language=e

i wonder also if you would be so kind as to comment on http://site-point.com/ and explain what’s going on there, as this is a perfect example of a parked domain

finally, i would ask you to please reread the original post in this thread and see whether it more closely describes a domain that redirects to an established site, or a domain which has a web page of ads intended to monetize the accidental traffic that comes its way

By actually seeing what the “Park Domain” option in cPanel does - which is to set up the new domain to point to the same folder as the main domain on your account is already using. There is no redirection involved as that is a totally different option in cPanel.

See http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ParkedDomains for the actual cPanel documentation on parked domains as written by the people who actually created cPanel and the Park Domain option that it has in it.

The wikipedia article you linked to is obviously incomplete when you consider that it privides totally different information from the information that cPanel provides on the subject where cPanel is actually a primary source of information on the subject as their software actually provides that functionality. Wikipedia only cover where you have one domain to park on a third party service and not where you have multiple domains and park one on another of your own.

Only some parked domains are like that. Any domain that points to the same filder as another domain is a parked domain. Any parked domain you set up within your hosting account will point to your existing web site on that account and all of the pages will be accessible.

It is only when you don’t have a site and park a domain on a third party service that you get the single page with a bunch of links.

As an example - I recently decided to get rid of the forum that I had at forums.felgall.com and so as to not lose any of the visitors who try to access the now non-existent forum have parked that onto www.felgall.com. I used to have www.felgall.com.au parked on www.felgall.com until I got around to creating some separate web pages for it.

If you go into your hosting account and select to park a domain it is not going to point it to some third party junk page provider, it will park it on top of the main domain of your account.

thanks guys for the quick answers, I understand now. What about people buying links on other websites within the actual text? Is it worth it more than the traffic it brings?

a parked domain is one which does not have a “real” website associated with it, and, instead, consists of a single page with a bunch of links to affiliate sites or other sources of (marginal) revenue, on the assumption that piddly income is better than no income, for example during the time that the real web site is being developed, or after a domain is acquired that once had a web site but which has been pulled

example of a parked domain: http://site-point.com/

domain parking is not usually associated with pointing one domain at another, and although that might be one way to use a domain, it isn’t considered “parked”…

Another use of domain parking is to be a placeholder for an existing web site. The domain holder might also choose to redirect a domain to another website it has registered, either through URL redirection, domain cloaking or by pointing it as an alias of the main domain, although if this is done by the ultimate registrant, the domain is then in use, rather than parked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_parking

example of a forwarding domain: http://sitepointforums.com/

A parked domain is simlpy an additional domain that points to the same content as another domain. Whether a domain is or isn’t parked relates simply to whether or not there is another domain pointing at the same folder on the server and has nothing whatever to do with what that folder might contain.

For SEP purposes a parked domain should use a 301 redirect to the domain it is parked on.

Whether or not buying links would be beneficial has nothing to do with SEO since all bought links are required to be marked as rel=“nofollow” so that the search engines will ignore them for SEO purposes. The bought links may be beneficial in themselves by bringing in more traffic to your site though.

where do you come up with these definitions?

i think you’re confusing parked domains with forwarding domains

please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_parking versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection

examples: site-point.com is a parked domain, while sitepointforums.com is a forwarding domain

Incorrect.

Domain parking refers to the purchase of a domain that is not immediately intended to provide email services or a website, instead it gets parked on a server. If you want to use your ‘sub-set’ logic then ‘pointing it at the same place as another domain’ is itself just a subset and parked domains can actually be used for many purposes. In fact the main use of domain parking, other than to store purchased but unused domains for the buyer, is to monitise ‘type-in’ traffic:

See page 12 of this PDF - What is Domain Parking (I’m assuming you’ll accept ICANN as an authority definition source when it comes to anything domain related?) but frankly if you Google it almost everyone who talks about domain parking is referring to domain monitisation.

You’ve based your deduction on a very task specific and limited information source.

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

The selling site, not the buying one so there is little to no risk when buying links.

Otherwise I will just buy a bunch of junk links and point them to my competitors’ sites to bring them down.

I think he was referring to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736 where it states:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Note: I couldn’t find a similarly worded term, condition or rule on Bing/Yahoo…

Yes, no sites ever get an SEO boost from buying links.

I’m being sarcastic btw

If they don’t follow the rules then when the search engine discovers this their site will be permanently banned from the search results

When? First of all, a worse case scenario is IF and I scoff when people assign the SEs godlike powers of being able to tell when an in-context link is sold. In context selling of backlinks is just about impossible to discover algorithmically, and Google doesn’t have time to do a manual review on every site on the Internet.

and you will be worse off than if they had followed the rules as then no one will be able to find their page in order to follow the link you paid for.

IF they get caught and the link ceases to send link juice the only way you are worse off is that you are out the money you spent for the link and that could be months or years down the line after you have profited from it for quite some time.