Is Domain Parking Dead? Not When You Park Your Own Pages

Debating around whether domain parking is dead tends to get blurred between pure parking (which requires only type-in) and indexing and ranking pages on Google (which generally requires SEO).

As we know, Google has made lots of updates in recent years to eradicate the wafer thin niche sites of the past that were gaming its own SEO rules. However, parked pages do not fit into this category as there is nothing black hat going into them as far as I can tell.

If you own a descriptive (.com) domain name with 3,600 monthly exacts and the keyword phrase is something that attracts ads or can link through to Amazon or other affiliate products then you have something useful that can be worth something to you without having to get involved in SEO.

These domain names are valuable because of direct type-in traffic.

Admittedly, levels of type-in can be fairly low on average (see my analysis) so let’s not get carried away but just 1% of exacts in type-in for the example above would bring 36 highly targeted internet users to your page every month.

36 visitors isn’t really a great deal to get excited about but if you had a modest but totally achievable CTR of 10% and a CPC or per affiliate sale earning of £0.50 you could bring in £15.60 profit in a year –

3,600 [exacts] x 1% = 36
36 x 10% CTR = 3.6
3.6 * £0.50 = £1.80
£1.80 x 12 = £21.60
Profit per annum = £15.60 (£21.60 – £6.00 [reg fee] = £15.60)
ROI per annum = 2.6 (£15.60 / £6.00 = 2.6)

I set up my parked pages in around 10 minutes and they require no further work because there is no SEO needed when you’re working with type-in traffic. Sure, the 2.6 ROI achieved in the example above is nowhere near that which can be achieved by developing out bigger authority sites but it’s a quick win and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I park my domains using an html layout that I coded myself and as a result I get to keep all the ad revenue and affiliate income earned and it is this that really makes parking work for me. I sit my code inside the Genesis Framework but any theme is fine so long as you know your way around WordPress.