Digitalquill

I have started using Sedo parking again after a period where I dropped it in favor of developing more of my sites into simple affiliate websites. The problem with this was that I tended not to get the time to put websites up and as such domains I bought just sat on my registrars page doing nothing, which is not a great investment.

Sedo parking is very easy to use, I always try to add my domains to Sedo anyway, at least the ones I buy now. I do have 100′s of legacy domains which are still sitting on my account, some developed some not, which I really should re-visit at some point.

Once the domain is added to Sedo all you need do is change the nameserver to point to Sedos name servers. and Away you go, Sedo handles the rest. You can optimise the pages created by Sedo by adding keywords to the domain in your Sedo account, however as I recently blogged you can not add your own unique content to the Sedo parking page, which means that the content on that page is not unique.

At that point I did wonder what Google would think about these pages generated by Sedo, now after a few weeks of experimentation with a couple of domains I can tell you… Google don’t think much of them to be honest!

I bought a domain swapcars.org.uk, a domain very much targeted at this experiment, Swap Cars has a local search volume on Google of 160,000 searches per month and as such, the keyword domain should be a winner for Google for this search term, and indeed when I first registered it and first added the Sedo parking page, Google soon found the domain and was ranking it well on the first page of the serps (Search engine results).

With a domain of this nature, with that amount of search volume this would be a winner, the number of hits on the parking page started to grow and the clicks generated soon covered the cost of the domain for the first year, which at a basic level is always my first target for these small websites, designed simply to hold the domain name without costing me any money.

In recent days I have noticed that the clicks have stopped, and the traffic has ceased to hit the page.

I took a look at the SERPs and with the search term of swap cars I can no longer find the site listed.

I started to look at other similar domains I have parked with Sedo, all showed a similar pattern. This brings me to the conclusion that they have all been added to the dreaded Google sandbox.

The only possible reason for this is that Google does not like the Sedo Parking pages. I suspect that as one of the major aspects that Google is looking for unique (and there in Googles eyes useful) content, these pages do not provide any such unique content, rather they simply provide a page of links with duplicate text on those links.

I will carry on my experimentation with Sedo Parking, however, I do believe that it is time to again reconsider how I place parking or holding pages on my domain names. After all since it is so easy to knock up a website with WordPress and one of my plugins (datafeed import plugin and Amazon Import Plugin), and when I add careful unique content to those pages they soon start ranking well.

A good example of this is my Cloche website which now has a page rank of 2 with very minimal link building. This site took a matter of minutes to produce and is bringing in a steady income from affiliate earnings on Amazon and others.

The only problem I have is that some of the domain names that I bought were bought specifically for the Sedo Parking scenario relying on search volume and click earnings. Swap Cars would be a hard domain to create an affiliate website for, but perhaps it is worth the domain registration fee for this experiment.

I wonder if anyone else is having the same issues with Sedo and their domains. Have you found a solution to this?

With the next Google update scheduled for sometime over Christmas, now is a great time to buy pre-used domain names.

If you can find a domain name that has a low page rank, which has a live site with good up-to-date content and good link backs the chances are that during the next page rank review the site may get a higher page rank and thus be worth more after the page rank review than before.

On the converse side if you are selling domains, it is worth keeping hold of domains until after the review to see what impact it will have on your domains page rank.

Remember though that page rank can also go down as well as up so a domain name may be worth less after the review. This is where your gambling spirit will come in!