Google announces "Parked Domain Classifier"

[enlytend]

From a post on Google's official blog announcing 10 recent search quality updates

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

Source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-monthly.html

Do you think this will have much of an effect? I thought nearly all parked pages were dumped from their search results long ago... unless they're now picking up some things that were flying under the radar ...

 

[alien51]

Your article link says "Page not found"?

edit: I found the link. thanks.

 

[RadianFM]

As the result, the parking sites will die as soon as possible.
SEDO, Parked, etc. must prepare the best plans to overcome it.

 

[carob]

Hi thanks for the info. But that link goes to a page that does not now contain the word "parked" - so where did you find the text you quoted?

 

[Kate]

Parking is supposed to rely on direct navigation, thus bypassing the search engines. And domains were already ranking badly in the index, when they were indexed.
I say: nothing really new.
If you have good traffic (= type-in) it doesn't affect you.

 

[exsedo]

That's how I understood parking to work too.
They either type your domain name into the address bar or reach your page via a backlink so indexing by g00gle isn't necessary.
However, I think some landing pages do still appear in the index.

 

[enlytend]

(Sorry about the URL mixups - that's what I get for posting at 4-something AM while scrambling to get my car packed and out the door by 6...)

Parking is supposed to rely on direct navigation, thus bypassing the search engines. And domains were already ranking badly in the index, when they were indexed.

Yes, that is how it's supposed to work. "Back in the day" a lot of parked pages got indexed and occasionally ranked on the first page besides. As far as I knew, Google nipped that profitable little game in the bud a few years ago, so I was surprised to see them mention this as a "new" algo change and am left wondering what is actually different. Are they targeting a new subset of pages?

 

[Kate]

It's the same thing when Google announce a new algorithm to unrank spammy websites.
In fact what they're saying is they will continue doing what they are already doing. PR thing.

 

[alien51]

Some minisites are just elaborate parked pages themselves. Maybe they are hunting those?

Time to move blocks of content around, to disrupt this pattern recognition algo. lol

 

[enlytend]

That's what I was wondering - if maybe they're now targeting those sites which walk the thin, gray line between "minisite" and "parked."

moving blocks of content may not do much though - more likely they would go by some formula including things like of quality/reading level/originality of the content, sites on the same IP, number and location of ads on the page, sites with the same nameservers, domains with the same owner, sites with a particular configuration, freshness of content ..

It's the same thing when Google announce a new algorithm to unrank spammy websites.

Yeah, but when they do that there's normally SOME change that shows up in the results people are tracking. Google may make vague statements and leave it to us to figure out what they did, but in the past every time they've made an announcement there's been *something* behind it.

If they did something new regarding parked domains or minisites, the domainer community is likely to identify it faster than the SEO community.

 

[Kate]

Some minisites are just elaborate parked pages themselves. Maybe they are hunting those?

Google have always been after the grey area, you know those minisites which are just elaborate parked pages as you put it, but they don't provide a good user experience.

Parked domains are not the problem for Google, because they are easy to detect and rank accordingly. The problem is the low-quality minisites - especially when black hat SEO techniques like cloaking are involved - and click fraud.

Google provides an advertising feed for parking providers and even parking services. They are not going to shoot themselves in the foot.
But they need to keep the index relevant. Otherwise people will stop using Google.

 

[alien51]

more likely they would go by some formula including things like of quality/reading level/originality of the content, sites on the same IP, number and location of ads on the page, sites with the same nameservers, domains with the same owner, sites with a particular configuration, freshness of content ..

Server commonality, i doubt if they will be paranoid enough to go that deep. That would be a Gestapo-like motivation on their part if they do that. It will make Google, evil.

I think it would make more sense to hunt down the BOT minisites. Like EPIK. Because a human being doing a lousy website "by hand", can only produce limited low-quality sites. But these BOTS, can spew them out like rabbits.

If they did something new regarding parked domains or minisites, the domainer community is likely to identify it faster than the SEO community.

I had mixed results. Some of my minisites rocketed to the top, while others got slammed 2-3 places down.

---------- Post added at 10:30 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:25 AM ----------

Google have always been after the grey area, you know those minisites which are just elaborate parked pages as you put it, but they don't provide a good user experience.

Well, just like what i have argued in the past, Google can simply push these sites 100 places down if they want.

If you "disappear" a website from the index (using the term from the other thread), that's like saying your website is not worthy to be displayed in page 6,000. Eventhough most of humanity could probably drill down to just page 50 for the most perservering.

And if you got "disappeared", you'll then need to "reapply" on Google Webmaster Tools.

 

[SpareDomains]

Parking is supposed to rely on direct navigation, thus bypassing the search engines. And domains were already ranking badly in the index, when they were indexed.
I say: nothing really new.
If you have good traffic (= type-in) it doesn't affect you.

Agreed and the reason I own 99% keyword .com domains as even some of my hand registered domains that sit for months doing nothing will all of a sudden make $10-$12 in a day direct from adsense for domains and basically pay for 1-2 years renewal on those days where the direct navigation just happens to kick in.

 

[carob]

Found an interesting quote on that linked page

Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

More than once I've submitted a feedback/comment/complaint because one site hogged the first three results on page 1, pushing me below 5th. One time they seemed to act right away, cutting the leading site down to just 2 entries.

And this point is relevant too if you use, re-use or spin articles

Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.