There has been a lot of talk in the industry about if a domain name can gain and/or maintain pagrank while pointed at a parking provider. I have proof now that both is possible and even sometimes out performs developing the parked domian name.
To clearify: I am only talking about using NameDrive as the parking provider. I did not test this out or try to make it happen. This PR happened all on its own and I just simply noticed it and then kept track of it over the past 4 months. December 2006 until this posting, where I feel confident in reporting my findings. Yes, my findings. I never found this out didn’t test this out.
The PR Status:
In one case I bought a name (a hyphenated .info) brand new never reg’ed before. I placed a site on it with mass directories and thousands of pages that all used the or related to the 2 word hyphenated domain. Did some basic SEO to Title tages, Meta data, site maps page, and link to it from 3 or 4 other sites (most pages linking to it we sub-directories and pages) One of the sites was a note worthy PR 4 and was Topic related the others were not. I submitted the site to SubmitExpress and let it be for a week. The site was crawled and the site stood on its own after the first month. It reached a PR 3 (lucky update came along) I noticed the site was using about 3 gigs of bandwidth a month for the few months but earning very little to make me want to keep the site up. I pulled my PR 4 link away (to use that link space for other projects) redirected the DNS to NameDrive and now around a year later or so it is still holding PR 3 Rank. Very cool.
Next case: I reg a dropped name (happy I got it too) It was deleted out of the system not a caught name. I never put a site on it. First I tried pointing the DNS at Sedo, but that place never earned me much and I would rather have the stats and control of the parked templates that NameDrive offers. I pointed the DNS over to NameDrive and then let it be. I made a few buck and I gathered my stats, although one day about 3 months ago I noticed it had a Page Rank of 3! Cool, but what caused this. I checked the backlinks and there aren’t any. Well there are two from different pages on one site with no ranking on the homepage or the pages the links come from. At to make it worse it is one of those “last chance to Register these domain Names because they are dropping in the next day” websites. So I am happy to report that the Domain name gained A PR 3 Just sitting at NameDrive. Nice!
Third (and last): I bought a name that had a PR 4 and got it for a very good price to boot. The name was parked at NameDrive when I got it and it showed a PR of 4 while Parked. So I left it there while I worked out a very basic site for the Domain Name and after 3 weeks ( I could have done it sooner, but other projects were ahead of it and I get distracted with other ofter and new projects too – you Domainers know what I’m talking about 😀 ) The site sold a few links off Text link ads and made it’s mondy back even got few clicks on the ole’ Adsense. But the bad news is even though I did the basics I tried before and still used on other site to get them listed, indexed, and hopefully ranked and making some money this one did all but go up in PR. Actually it went down. Geez. Well It’s still there, having dropped to PR 2 and dropped off my current projects list. Strange to because I put a site there and geared all the basic SEO stuff to the links that were coming in. Seems I should have either designed the site better or just left it parked at NameDrive…but you win some and lose some and hopefully learn something along the way. Also just wanted to say Thanks to ND.