"Define Legit Traffic"

[Kenny]

This is carried over from another thread...

Have at it boys and girls.

Cy

 

[.X.]

Thanks to CY for posting this thread else where so others could find it.

I see you guys have gotten off topic again as of recent. But ill give my 2cents on the last 10 pages.

I am new to parking and actively domaining but I have owned domains for years that just sat empty and never used or had died for some reason or another. I tried parking and I am glad to see that domains that have been reged and idle for years are able to make a dollar a week or so. Now that I have finally seen the possibilities of monetization I am looking for other means of adding to my parked revenue.

The way I see it is that our parked pages are more a a affiliate with the advertisers. Our success is their success. If I have a parked page I should be allowed to drive as much traffic to it as possible since this is in the best interest to the advertisers to. The example with the ping pong balls is a great example. An advertiser would love it if you were spending the money to drive traffic to their site. This should be allowed as long as we are not competing with the actually advertiser for keywords. Submitting the site to link directories or writing articles is no different in my mind than submitting the site to search engines.

The reason I am still parking most of my pages now is that its the easiest way to get revenue from them. Of course it would be great to develop them but who says that developing would make you money. Your options are adsense and affiliates if you have no products or services to sell. Ive attempted to develop a new domain that involves both of these methods and have been using paid advertising to drive traffic to them. It just hasn't paid off the clicks cost me 0.40 and adsense only gives 0.02 cents in return on the same traffic. With parking it just takes 1 click to make it worth it. I has just been impossible for me to find a ground between the two methods that works.

You are right. We should be able to drive traffic to our parking pages. But the traffic must be of high quality, And meet the regional specifics of each parking service, Any thing other than high quality traffic, Will not convert as well for the advertiser, So keeping the traffic of the highest quality, Is key.

Definitely do not put parked domains in your signature of any forums, That can get you kicked from a parking company fast.

Remember, The advertisers are paying good money to advertise, It is our obligation to bring them highest quality traffic possible, So they can convert.

 

[PowerUp]

I'm going to skip all the discussion above and just post my summary.

At the very top, we have Traffic.
Traffic is then classified into "Legit Traffic" and "Non Legit Traffic"
Legit traffic would be human visitors, no matter how these visitors arrive at the page. Non legit traffic will be visits by bots and spiders.

Legit Traffic is then divided into "Natural Traffic" and "Unnatural Traffic"
Natural traffic comes from type-ins and Search Engines. Unnatural traffic comes from backlinks, advertising (eg adwords) and anything else you do to manipulate traffic to your site.

Both natural and unnatural traffic is then divided again into "quality traffic" and "non quality traffic". Quality traffic means targetted visittors. Targetted in the eyes of the advertisers could mean geographic, income, gender, age and so on depending on the criteria and parameters have in their minds. These criteria becomes the target, hence targetted traffic.

Note that unnnatural traffic that meets the criteria of the advertisers are also considered as quality traffic.

So, here's the summary tree.

Traffic
1. Legit
--->a) Natural
----->i) Quality
----->ii) Non-Quality

--->b) Unnatural
----->i) Quality
----->ii) Non-Quality

2. Non-Legit

 

[kiore]

Traffic is then classified into "Legit Traffic" and "Non Legit Traffic"
Legit traffic would be human visitors, no matter how these visitors arrive at the page.

I think Legit Traffic needs to exclude people who are duped into arriving at the page through, pop-ups (or pop-unders), misleading links, any artificial redirection, etc.

Perhaps it could be rephrased "Legit traffic would be human visitors who intentionally arrive at the page"

 

[Sedo]

Sedo's Parking Program

:hi: Hi All,

This is a great time to address policies at various parking providers, as Fall is kicking in and we'll all see a rise in people returning to the indoors (and logically, to their computers). Sedo gets a lot of questions about traffic to parked domains like "What is natural traffic?" or "Can I promote traffic to my domains?" It looks as though these questions have already been answered by several people, but I want to take a moment to clarify some of the finer points of Sedo's policies regarding domain parking and traffic to parked domains.

If you haven't done so and are parking with Sedo, I recommend taking a few minutes to thoroughly read through Sedo's Rules for Domain Parkers:

http://www.sedo.com/about/policy.php?page=rules_parkers_us&tracked=&partnerid=&language=us

To add to the rules as they are on the site and as they are agreed to when setting up a Sedo acocunt, I've put together a list of pointers that might help clarify Sedo's stance on (what constitutes natural) traffic:

1. Sedo considers natural traffic to be when a) a visitor manually enters the domain name into a browser or b) a visitor finds the domain in search results that were not there because the owner paid for them.

2. Parked pages are essentially search results. Sedo does not like sponsored search results, and does not encourage search engine submissions. The reason for this is simple: Internet users like to find websites when searching, and it is misleading to represent a parked page as a destination for goods or services when parked domains are portals to such things. I don't think anyone likes searching for more search results. :hehe:

3. External hyper-linking to a parked domain is a no-no. A domain can be mentioned in a forum for sales purposes (and you can certainly link to a domain's "for sale"/offer page), and if people enter the domain name in manually to check it out, then that's primarily okay. However, psychologically speaking, a hyperlink is basically the same as asking somebody to visit the parked page.

4. Asking anyone, in any way, to visit a parked domain (and especially click on the ads there) is against Sedo's policy. This includes PPC (pay-per-click) programs, social networking site postings (we're all on them), classified ads (a certain list comes to mind), link exchanges, any sort of paid advertising, etc. Essentially, if you've had a hand in a visitor arriving at your parked domain, there's a good chance it's not natural traffic and will be treated as such.

5. Having friends, family, associates, acquaintances, or anyone else sit at their desks to visit and click away on your parked pages is also not good.

6. Often, sales agreements are reached because of traffic stats. We've ended transactions because of traffic audits (this is not super common, but does occasionally happen), and we do not want to see this happen, to anybody. After all, none of us would want to pay for a domain only to find out the traffic was a lie (or that we have to continue paying big bucks to keep that traffic. 6,000 to 0 in a day, anyone?)

7. Sedo watches domains for keyword relevancy (which can also get some domainers into trouble). I recommend using keywords that relate to the domain name in question. If that's not the best option (e.g. what's a good keyword for 5664529.com?), "webarchiv" as a keyword at Sedo will pull up a generic portal, using a two-click system. it's harder to get clicks this way, but usually each click is worth more $$.

I hope that helps to clear the air some. Following the rules (pretty simple, really; it's not a horribly long list) helps to protect the integrity of the parking program and the industry as a whole. It can also help improve EPC (earnings per click) values. By all means, feel free to ask us questions (we'd rather have a dialogue earlier rather than a "discussion" later). best of luck to all of you, and as a quick plug, check out Sedo's new Fall promotion for parking domains:

https://sedo.com/fallpromotion/index.php?language=us&partnerid=25303

Happy Fall and happy domaining!

Always,
Keith

 

[kriss05]

Keith,

thanks for this important post. I have some questions/comments though

:hi: Hi All,


1. Sedo considers natural traffic to be when a) a visitor manually enters the domain name into a browser or b) a visitor finds the domain in search results that were not there because the owner paid for them.

3. External hyper-linking to a parked domain is a no-no. A domain can be mentioned in a forum for sales purposes (and you can certainly link to a domain's "for sale"/offer page), and if people enter the domain name in manually to check it out, then that's primarily okay. However, psychologically speaking, a hyperlink is basically the same as asking somebody to visit the parked page.

How about traffic from "old" link? I asked Sedo stuff about what Sedo considers to be natural traffic and got responce that traffic from "old" link is natural as well. But here you mention that external hyper-linking is NO.

Secondly, IMO hyperlink is not asking somebody to visit parked page but easier and more convenient way to visit parked page if people are interested in it.

:hi: Hi All,
2. Parked pages are essentially search results. Sedo does not like sponsored search results, and does not encourage search engine submissions. The reason for this is simple: Internet users like to find websites when searching, and it is misleading to represent a parked page as a destination for goods or services when parked domains are portals to such things. I don't think anyone likes searching for more search results. :hehe:

If Sedo doesn't encourage search engine submissions, how people will find parked page without typing in the name into browser? And IMO many people including me do like to find portals with many links because often it is more convenient to have many links at a time rather then use, for example, search engine every time.

In my opinion, Sedo has great parking interface but...are you going to implement any changes to templates, PPC? IMO one of the main problems of Sedo parking is poor templates. In my experience, traffic to Sedo parked domains is pretty good but CTR, PPC are very small...you have to do something with that

Regards,

kriss05

 

[Sedo]

Hi kriss05,

Expiring backlinks are considered when performing routine traffic audits. Sedo does look at past development and the source of all traffic to a domain when determining if the traffic meets the standard of quality as laid out in the Rules for Domain Parkers. Not all external links are bad, but that decision is made in the context of the domain and its history. It's not an easy decision to make, but luckily we have people trained in just that.

Active hyperlinking to a parked domain that has no evidence of past development, or from sites that are unrelated in topic or nature, is what we look for. We also look for external links that have clearly been placed by the current seller, such as those on social networking sites, classifieds sites, and the like (most of which can be easily removed by contacting a webmaster).

Keep in mind that although hyperlinking may be more convenient, we're confident that without this extra prompting, a visitor will still come to the domain if interested in it for any reason. An Internet user is definitely more likely to visit the domain without prior interest if its hyperlinked, because of this convenience. Plus, if a domain is parked, there is no true "content" other than pre-specified search results. Because of this, we ask that parked pages are not subject to "seller-inspired" hyperlinking of any kind. Again, hyperlinking to a sales page is fine.

As far as search engine submissions are concerned, search engines will pick up a domain if there is enough natural traffic. If somebody has arrived via search results, they are most likely not looking for more search results. We do fully agree that parked domains are helpful in allowing visitors to find what they're looking for, but if they've already used a search engine to find a domain, being presented with more links defeats the purpose of that initial search. Domain parking is designed to work in the place of search engines when people are entering terms directly into their browsers as full domain names.

Lastly, Sedo is always looking for ways to improve the parking program. Our members will definitely be the first two know when more templates are available and when new features have been introduced. We'll do our best to help you make the most of the program!

Always,
Keith

 

[kriss05]

Keith, thanks again. Things are getting to be clearer and clearer

One point to clarify more:

It is well known that Sedo has advanced SEO tools. These include adding keyword to title tag, placing keywords into parked pages as well as keeping old keywords in the page after new ones have been used etc. Due to all SEO tools Sedo parked domans have enough traffic from SEPR. So, if Sedo implemented strong SEO tools in order for people could find parked pages when making search requests to search engines, why Sedo doesn't encourage search engine submussions? I mean only non-paid submission to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN. Or this kind of submissions is OK?

So, are users still allowed to submit their Sedo parked domains to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN but Sedo just doesn't encourage to do that or it is against Sedo Rules to make such submissions? Moreover, it seems to be impossible, to the best of my knowledge, to distinguish the way parked domains habe been indexed: due to manual submission or indexing by search engine "itself".

Regards,

kriss05

 

[Donmarick]

That's nice we have an answer from Sedo, the pity is that other parking companies work differently with other algorithms.