Should you park your unused domains? That’s what most folks are asking themselves these days. Many domainers use services such as Google Adsense or Sedo to park their domains. They make a few buck here and there, but the real money in the domaining business is earned when you sell a $9 domain that you buy for $30K or more. But the practice of parking domains has been and still being used by too many people.

I personally believe that parking brandable domain names is just a waste of time and value. The traffic that you receive with a parked domain will not earn you too much money, and you end up devaluing your online asset by parking it. In most cases, you are not going to get any SEO benefit for your troubles, and you will have to split your revenue with those domain companies. Why park when you can optimize your domains for SEO?

As you probably know, as your domain ages, it becomes more valuable. Google does put more trust in domains that are older. The least thing you can do is put your own text ads up and add your own content to customize your domains for search engines. You can also put Wordpress on these domains and completely optimize them for keywords in their related niche. Either way, you are going to build your assets and add value to them whereas by parking them with a traditional domain parking service you are going to devalue your domain.

Parking domains is very easy to do, but why settle for less when you can build assets in your sleep. A domain that comes with a PR of 3 or 4 is worth way more than a domain that has been parked and gathering dust over the years. So in that sense I do agree with the folks at WhyPark. Parking a domain is a waste of a valuable asset. Building long-term assets is way more lucrative and way more rewarding in the long run.

What’s your take: do you still prefer parking your domains with sites such as Sedo?

It may been out for a while but I just noticed that Google adsense ads now come with navigation. That’s pretty cool, though I can’t say it will be more effective. The fact of the matter is a lot of people ignore these adsense ads, so you don’t expect to get a lot of clicks on a single ad. That’s why I think adding these won’t help publishers wrong. At the same time, it gives the publishers more to work with, so we just have to wait and see how effective this will be.

If you are new to SEO, you need to be careful what some consultants claim about the effects of Adsense/Adwords for your search engine rankings. Adsense which allows many publishers to monetize their websites is not going to help you at all with your search engine natural rankings. The same applies to Adwords. No matter how much money you spend with Google Adwords, you are not going to move an inch up or down the natural rankings. So, no! No benefit from Google Adsense or Adwords for that matter.