We've been chatting with our buddy Andrew over at DomainNameWire about domain name parking. I guess he's knee deep into the issue as he writes and follows the domainer world pretty closely. Chad and I really don't. It seems that SEO and domain name parking are really different industries. But it makes me wonder why.
Domainers buy their domain names with the hopes that they can earn income from them while they hold them and then later sell them for a gain. From this perspective, they strike me as very similar to any other asset class. Stocks or bonds, for example, have both a yield and a appreciation component to them. Similarly, domain name registrations do too. And we're all heard about the wild sums paid for a particularly catchy domain name on the Internet.
But what Andrew has helped me understand is that most of the direct revenue (he calls rent) comes from ads. And the traffic that is clicking on those ads is type-in traffic. That means people who actually put the words directly in their browser url window and slap a dot-com at the end. I never knew this. And as a religious Google user from day-1, I rarely type anything anywhere except my Google search window.
I have to think that this trend is dropping. I also know that the availability of good domain names has dropped. Even though they are inventing more suffixes all the time, I would imaging that the free domain parking deals only really work with .com. In summary, I am going to explore this a bit. I think there are some SEO implications for what the domainers are doing. We know that the flat inbound link count - measured as only 1 vote per domain - is a powerful predictor of search engine rankings. This, combined with the notion that you can no longer buy a domain and stick it on a free domain parking service and expect any significant revenues, means that innovation in the domain name parking space is needed.