SEO Power Tip: Don’t Park Your Extra Domains

If you are like most people either in business on the web or in business generally, you may have accumulated some extra domain names. And, like most people, you might tend to leave those domain names in a dormant or parked status. GoDaddy is a perfect example: they offer free domain parking for domains purchased through their service.

Domain Parking: Almost a Scam

If you use domain parking services, it really isn’t a service at all– the parking service places ads on your domain and does not share of the ad revenue with you–I wonder how much revenue GoDaddy earns in the aggregate from the 100s of thousands, or millions, of domain names parked there. Also, parked domains in most cases will not be indexed by search engines. So, in the eyes of a search engine, a parked domain doesn’t exist.

Best Approach for Parked Domains

The better approach is to “park” your domain by yourself. Set up a very simple page, or better a few pages with some text that is original and contextually relevant to the domain name itself. You can even place some Google Adsense Advertisements on the site to earn a few dollars a month. Meanwhile, the search engines will crawl and index your site because of the original content they find there. Then, when you finally go live with your domain, you’ll have an indexing history—old sites with some age and history always outrank brand-new sites.

An extra tip: always leave your contact information easily findable on a parked domain– you never know when someone will want to offer money for it.