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?

I have been buying several domain names in the recent weeks, and in an attempt to become smarter in my domain name purchasing I have been concentrating on the search volume for the keywords or terms contained in that domain name.

After referral by one of the chaps I work with I have been following Acorn Domains forum and I have to say that the time spent has been extremely fruitful in terms of what I have learned.

I have always bought domain names, usually to suit a niche I have identified in my affiliate marketing, however, up to now I have never really put a great deal of thought into the domain names other than finding one that suits and is available.

As such I have bought some terrible domain names, and some not so bad ones, however I am trying to become smarter in the domain purchases, but researching the keywords using Googles adwords. The idea being that if your domain contains keywords which have a high search volume then Google will rank you higher because the search term matches your domain and a high volume of searches means that your slice of the clicks pie will be larger, in theory…

The problem with this is that many of the good co.uk and org.uk domains have been taken already so it was with interest that I followed a thread on Acorn Domains which talked about me.uk domains. I had always thought that the rules regarding the ownership of those domains was that they must only be used for personal websites, however it appears that is not strictly the case.  As long as they are owned by an individual rather than a company.

The discussion also looked at if a me.uk domain would rank in Google, the conclusion was that we probably have not seen any raking highly, however, high search volume with a keyword or phrase can only be a good thing, it may not rank as highly as the co.uk or org.uk versions, but there is still potentially a slice of the pie to be had.

As a little experiment I have bought walkingboots.me.uk and created a quick site using my Amazon import plugin for WordPress and added some unique content (of which I will add some more when I get a little bit of time). I will now do some link building and monitor is page rank and position in Google, and most essentially how much it earns.

As with all my domains, the only thing I set out to do initially is cover the cost of the registration, the cost of hosting is covered by other projects so as long as it does than then I have not lost out, but I am interested to see how difficult the me.uk will be to market in comparison to the a co.uk or org.uk domain.

I have bought a few others and stuck some sites on them so I have a few that I am look at. I will report back in a few months to tell you how it progresses.

I would also like to emphasize, if you are looking at getting into domaining or even like me are an affiliate marketer who buys a lot of domains for their use and nor re-sale, Acorn Domains is a very useful resource, get yourself signed up.