Today's question comes from Matt in Mountain View who asks,
I have a parked domain and want to launch a new website on it.
Are there any pitfalls I should avoid?
Should I keep my domain parked or put some sort of stub pagethere? Good question.
I'm glad to clarify this because Google does have a park domain detector.
So you've probably seen this where you land on the page and there's the lady with the backpack smiling at you.
And it's like click here to learn more about whatever.
And those pages aren't as useful.
Users don't like to see them, and they complain when they see them.
So we do have a park domain detector that we run.
And then when we detect that page is parked or domain is parked, then we try not to show those pages in our search results.
So the fact is, if you leave your domain park right up until you launch, it might take a little while for us to recrawl that page and reprocess it.
And for the park domain detector to really believe that it's no longer parked.
So my advice would be once you buy a domain.
If you do intend to put something there a month, a few weeks, whatever beforehand, just write a paragraph for two or three and say this will be the future home of XYZ.
We're going to be the world's number one source of red Widgets or blue Widgets or green Widgets or whatever it is that you'replanning to do.
And even if it's mysterious, just make sure that you write a paragraph or text of two.
It's not just like an empty page or like a complete emptyweb template, because we do try to detect that sort of behavior basically differentiate yourself.
So it's not a parked page.
And then that way, when you do put on the full live page, the full live site, we don't have to learn that your page is not parked.
We can just instantly reindex and see that you've got the content. So it ideally makes sense.
It's relatively straightforward, but it's just a little tip because otherwise, if you're parked right up until you launch, it's almost like doing a U turn.
It takes us just a little while to recalibrate and figure out that the page is not parked anymore.
So that small little bit of effort often will help in trying to make sure that the launch goes smoothly or that we're able to find the content relatively quickly.