The Relevance of Direct and Indirect Navigation to Google Domain Parking

Overview

I heard on the grapevine that the many domain parking pages have publicised their intention to ‘police’ the thousands of websites parked with them to help eliminate fraud. The intention is to increase click-through rates, thereby increasing the revenue, of domain owners. This brings to the fore the continuing debate about the merits of direct and indirect navigation. One side of the coin notes that visitors who click onto a site from a bookmark tend to remain longer and have been noted to be repeat buyers.

Their records note that these visitors convert to customers at a rate of 3.3% - in fact, one particular domain owner recorded an overall average of 4.24% of visitors converting to buyers. The other side of the coin dissents, believing that direct navigation achieves good conversion rates because visitors invariably type in the name of the website they have visited or shopped at before and are return visitors who actually want to purchase something. As I have mentioned, the jury is still out and probably will be for some indefinite time!

Cybersquatting and Typosquatting

How is this relevant to Google domain parking? I am talking about using Google domain parking for activities such as cybersquatting and typosquatting, one of which relies on the psychological aspects of visitors ‘recognising’ a particularly well-known name and clicking on it specifically because they think they will be taken to the website of the popular and profitable company: instead they end up on another website masquerading under a similar domain name. The other incidence relies partly on indirect navigation and partly on direct navigation – the website is again masquerading as a profitable and popular well-known brand, but with the domain name spelled incorrectly, literally fooling potential customers into visiting.

Visiting a website by mistake has now become a huge industry, with most Fortune 500 companies being subject, at one time or another, to one or the other practices of cybersquatting or typosquatting. The computer company Dell is currently suffering: they are currently pursuing a bunch of companies through the District Court in Florida for having registered as many as 1,100 bewilderingly analogous domain names, detrimental to the business of Dell. You would think that, with the level of technology at the fingertips of Google domain parking services it would be able to weed out these companies infringing the trademarks of legitimate companies, wouldn’t you?

Summary

Google domain parking services appear to have introduced an algorithm, specifically designed to deal with this problem by assessing the relevancy of domains being parked. Basically, without going into details, if this new algorithm considers your new domain is likely to attract few clicks, or little in the way of typed-in traffic, then your domain will be rejected. Now this new Google domain parking algorithm is up and running Google will only accept domains that are likely to attract a proportionately high amount of traffic – although, of course, they don’t actually publicise exactly what percentage your domain needs to achieve to pass their acceptance barrier.