Be Careful With Parked Domains

As a site matures, website owners frequently buy and retain alternative domain names and there are many valid reasons for doing so, including brand protection, brand relationships and simply to prevent competitive entry.  If you intend to use your domains as pointers to your site however (especially in the case of brand protection), make sure that your 301 redirect is correctly enabled.  We've talked about 301 redirects in the past and a good resource for implementing them can be found here.  Parking your new domains can have serious implications that may not be realized in the short term.

Domain Parking
A frequent, alternative solution is the parked domain.  In shared web hosting, it is very common for webmasters to use this feature, because it's easily available and simple to add on (usually just a few clicks in a web hosted control panel).  Parked domains enable the desired URL to act exactly like the main URL.  In essence, DOMAIN.com and DMAIN.com are both browser accessible and present the same content.

There in lies the danger.

This is can be construed as duplicate content, one of the most critical issues in SEO to avoid.  But if you don't market the web address, how can it even be found in the first place?  A great question to ask, and one that is asked by webmasters over and over.  Directly speaking, if there is no marketing presence of the parked domain, in theory there will be no availability for a search spider to access and index the material, and in turn, no way for the search engine to potentially be confused about what content should be available.

Unfortunately, there are ways for the search engine spider to not only find that domain, but crawl it and index the unintended, duplicate material.  How?  Here are some examples:

• A user types into their browser the parked domain and gets to your webpage.  They bookmark the material in http://del.icio.us/ without even acknowledging that they typed in the wrong URL.
• A scraper site aggregates new domain purchase data and presents the information as links on their website, in an effort to draw traffic.
• Your data with ICANN, which lists the domain name, is crawled by a search engine spider.

Once the domain gets crawled, it gets indexed, unless you tell the spider not to index it somehow.  But in the event of domain parking, you do not have this type of control.  The only control you have is in being able to point the domain to your main website. Eventually the parked domain will be integrated into the search results and while it may not effect your rankings initially, as the spider keeps crawling and seeing the additional domains, it adds confusion and clutter to your website and ultimately devalues your overall search presence.

How To Fix The Problem
First, remove the parked domain from the web server system.  If you are using an apache web server and have access to a control panel, you need to do the following:

• Create a sub-folder in the web root for the domain.
• Point the domain, using the control panel to the newly created folder. (Note, if you had the domain parked already, the DNS settings should already be in place.  If this is a new domain, you need to have the DNS set to the location of the web server.)
• Upload a .htaccess file with the following information:
  
  Options +FollowSymLinks
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.DOMAIN.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  
  Effectively, DOMAIN.com refers to the main domain that you want to be displayed to your users.
• This will now 301 redirect the (formerly) parked domain to the appropriate destination.

Creating a 301 redirect versus parking a domain ensures that you will not inadvertently display duplicate content on the web.  If you are using a Windows based web server, there are slightly different steps, but essentially a similar process.  Remember, just because you are not advertising your parked domains does not mean that they cannot be accessed online.

Comments

[Rich Benvin]

I'm a little confused with the term "parked domain". In this post are you referring to domains being used to redirect to your main website and not a domain parking service like DomainSponsor using their nameservers to monetize your domain until ready to develp the site? Are there any adverse effects in Google and other search engines when using such a domain parking service? Thanks!

[dedmond29]

I am not familiar with DomainSponsor but am aware of the type of thing you are trying to do with an undeveloped domain. This is slightly different and should not have any adverse effects in that type of situation. You are not intending to use "domain B" as some for of representation of "domain A". This is what I was doing and should have used a 301 redirect, to simply redirect users who somehow found domain B, to the appropriate location.

In my specific domain scenario, I had a website I was using and marketing, bought an additional domain that I thought would be valuable as an alternative name, and simply used my web host's "park domain" feature so that if someone typed in "www.newdomain.com", they saw the exact same thing as if they typed in "www.olddomain.com". In theory, if I do not market the new domain, it should never become visible, but for reasons stated above, it did get indexed and also confused in relation to which domain was the actual, "official" domain. Of course, my error in judgment was accidental and it did not penalize me in search, but did list the park domain as the web address for keyword-specific search results.