I am taking another trip down a side road on the super highway again today. I will get back onto the right road as soon as I get my GPS on line. Some of the bill boards stole my attention. I have as many questions as answers on this one, and am thinking out loud more than anything else.
Bare with me.
Self parking, or Valet parking?
I have been looking at domain parking, including cash parking. I had quite a few domains that I didn't have much of any ting planned for. I bought them while trying to fill out orders, and sometimes the lure of dollar .info's is like the lure of a cold one on a hot dusty Texas day after a hard day at work. Well, that's how I got them, now what to do with them?
I built the websites that I wanted, all that I could get to in my allotted time. And there they were, staring me in the face, each time I went to the control panel.
I realized, that just leaving them for someone else to collect money from posted ads, didn't make much sense, although my very gracious registrar, provides a multitude of great free services, free ad supported hosting, very good prices, and I am amazed by their quality of customer service, quick responsive, thorough, friendly and accurate. The best I have experienced!
Still, I wanted to do more. I looked at cash parking options. There was a wide, almost bewildering range in price, service, user control, percentage of return,etc.
Then there was the question of honesty, and there are some kinda shady lookin companies parked along that stretch of road!
My company offers cash parking for a fee, but most of my domains, won't attract much attention on their own.
It offers starter web pages, which might be useful in driving traffic to the other pages you have that they let you list, and gives you the option of selling the domain from that location. And a chance that if someone stumbles by, they might take interest, and build a little traffic.
It offers for sale pages, but you have no choice in how it is displayed, or the ads placed on it, and of course, the company collects any revenue while it is there.
Basically, it goes like this:
you can leave them parked with the registrar, where if any ad money is made, it is made by their parking attendants.
You can have them valet parked, but I never liked handing my keys over to one of those guys. Besides, you have limited control of the meta info.
You can park it yourself, if you have a parking lot or billboard (hosting)
You are not going to build any search engine traffic parked in one of those services. Even though most sites I see on the web, are little more than glorified bill boards or parked pages, a lot of ads and links, and a little text between them. I am not sure what the difference between a page full of ads, and a page full of links with a minimum of text means to search engines, but sometimes the lines are blurred, and the bots can't see.
The only way they get traffic on their own is if it is misdirected due to spelling errors,like my unfortunate attempt to get to an international relief organization that I really like. I misspelled "heifer" and almost never got away, then spelled it correctly, but left out the "International" and got stuck in the ditch again!
I think that parking pages is less like a parking lot and more like a billboard on the Internet super highway.
So, using that analogy, this is what I am doing:
I am building pages, fast and furious!
I am building pages, with all the content I can muster,
I am adding ads, as fast as I can click,
I am forwarding domains to the sites I have built. This is really a pretty good Idea. If you build a page, and forward 10 similar domains that might draw that type of traffic, then you have, in effect, 11 monitized pages, but there is still the issue of traffic, and whether that past traffic from a forwarded domain, will register when it comes time to build a site, or sell the name. Maybe some of you more experienced guys can tell me the answer to that.
I am linking pages, to get whatever traffic I can from my other pages,
I am switching material, which the search engines seem to like. There again, I wonder at the validity of search engines wanting new info, and wonder if the future of the Internet may be in the blogosphere. If change is what they want, then, that is the place to find it!
At least, if you park it yourself, you have the chance to get search engine traffic, which usually leads to some real traffic. You might build some brand name recognition, and you might get a few ads clicked on. You can also promote your other sites, as ads, or links. There is that question again!
The sad thing is, that a site could potentially get a very high page rank, and be of no use to anyone. As wittiness to this I call to the stand the "Lupine Glupe" experiment, I just googled it, and most of it is gone now, but there is one page that said, "you must be looking for...I deleted it because it was full of stupid content, and if you are looking for it, you must be stupid too! Don't feel to bad though...." It even had a fake 404 error page! Anyway, it is possible to say nothing of value, and still have a highly ranked, and possibly well traveled web page.
Search engines don't seem to like parked pages, but there again, I suppose a clever person could emulate the work of other clever webmasters, who seem to be adept at disguising the fact that they are parked by shifting a little content, offering a link index to related sites,(perhaps even their own) which appears to be helpful, although the same thing could be done with a group of disjointed words and sentences, while an Einstein quality theory went un noticed!
I'm not sure what the answer is, not really even sure what the question is, but I know that I need to make my domains as pleasing as possible, offer good content, even if it seems boring by contrast with some of the fakes, and let the things go where they will. All the while, hoping for some sanity.
