Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Are Domain Parks Playing Unfairly in Google?

John Andrews has been writing about the domainers becoming publishers:

The next wave of the competitive internet has arrrived, and it’s driven by the Domainers. No, not parked pages, and no, not typo squatters. Domainers as publishers.
After reading the post I was thinking "So what? They'll still have to fight for SE traffic just like everyone else except the added advantage of the premium domain names which will get type-in traffic and maybe rank a little better."

Well, I was sorely mistaken that it would still be even close to a level playing field as the domainers are using their domain park network to generate many thousands of backlinks in Google and Yahoo.

My initial investigation of all these backlinks in Google and Yahoo showed different links in the live sites I visited vs. Google or Yahoo cache which means they might be cloaking. The page cache always had specific links to their publisher sites on parked pages when the search engines crawled, but it'll be hard to prove it wasn't coincidence unless this situation persists over time.

The real question is why do the search engines index domain park sites in the first place?

The lame answer you'll get is "in case they turn into an actual website".

OK, crawl the sites, fine, but why should those parked pages show up in the search results or be allowed to influence page rank before they become an actual site of value?

We all know the an$wer to that que$tion a$ well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would have to $ay it might be becau$e the $ite in que$tion ha$ their advert$ on them and they make make a few cent$ all the while claiming relevance in their re$ult$

Unknown said...

It's surprising that the domainers have taken so long to figure that they might be more money on the table if they develop a proper site on their premium domains.

A combi of great type in traffic + highly relevant domain is gonna be a toughie to beat. The SEs seem to love keywords and such in the domain name.