What is Domain Parking?
Domain parking is the practice of utilising a domain name without developing it into a website or email account, in effect keeping the domain name with the purpose of creating a website in the future, to protect your trademark or to generate income from the traffic that the domain name generates. Therefore domain parking can be monetized or non-monetized.
You type in what you think is the domain name of a particular site, but instead you find yourself at a generic-looking page with many links relevant to the site you were looking for. This is a “parked” domain. Perhaps you mistyped the site address, or you appended the wrong top-level domain.
Domain parking can be extremely lucrative, if you register domains with a view to sell them on at a later date but aren’t sure what to do with them in the meantime, parking them can be a good idea. There are many sites that offer a domain parking service (please see our homepage http://www.themainparking.com), which generates the page with the pay-per-click links on it that redirect the traffic from the parked domain to relevant sites and pay you per click.
Another method is to set up your own parked page, and put pay-per-click ads up on it (this method can be time consuming if applied to multiple domains).
The main attraction of domain parking is the ease with which it can be conducted with the domain parking companies automating much of the process. Another form of domain parking is registering a domain that you know people are likely to type instead of your actual domain name, and having it redirect to your site. This method can direct relevant organic traffic towards your site.
Parked domains are domains that do not have a hosting account associated to them, and that are usually enabled with URL forwarding capabilities or through changing the default name servers, so that they point to an existing website. For example, let’s assume that you already run a forum that is hosted in a subdirectory of your Domain Name, as follows:
http://www.example.com/forum/index.html.
You may at one point want to register a separate domain name for your newsletter, so that it is more memorable, but may not want to move its pages to a new server, open a new hosting account, or pay to establish an add-on domain. The best option therefore is to register and park a new domain for your newsletter (for example: http://www.forum.com), which will be forwarded to http://www.example.com/froum/index.html. Your new domain can be registered with any company (preferably one that offers free URL forwarding). From a web user’s perspective the typed in domain: http://www.forum.com, will not remain in the browser address bar, but will change to http://www.domain.com/forum/index.html as soon as the page is displayed.
Parked domains can also be useful to webmasters whose site is hosted by a free hosting service, this allows the long and difficult to remember web address given with the free hosting account to be substituted with a domain name relevant to the website.
URL forwarding of parked domains can also be used effectively by forwarding traffic to affiliate programs and earning a commission.