beware - parked domains and search placement

[wildgopher_com]

Just an fyi to those of you with parked domains at register.com..
By default we pointed a lot of our unused domains to our site (set the ip of our main site) thinking it didn't make any difference - in fact register.com even advertises to do so to encourage more domain purchases.
Soon the parked domains started to appear on google search results along with the domain that we actually use - on first page results.
Shortly there after, and since then, we no longer appear anywhere near the front page for anything significant on google. We were essentially down-graded for cloaking - probably because their crawler picked up our parked domains on register.com.
It didn't affect our ranking on yahoo search though, although we have removed the ip reference from all of our parked domain names now.

just an fyi !

[cbp]

What sort of redirect did register.com use?
Google's guidelines clearly say a 301 permanent redirect is the one to use.

CBP

[wildgopher_com]

I don't know.. They make it pretty simple - you just enter the IP address for a domain and submit. They hide the details from you.
The google people were very friendly about it, but what can you do.. I sent register.com an email and never heard back.

Tom

[cbp]

They are probably not using a 301, so that is probably why Google handled it the way they did.

Also look for other reasons why you do not rank well in Google, as this may not be it. You PR is only 2.

CBP

[wildgopher_com]

I am confident that was it.. and had the agreement of one of the google reps. This was all before we had a ranking... (we are a new site).

Our ranking did not change on yahoo. Don't ask me how we got on the first page, but it change overnight on google as soon as the other domains showed up. We are still on the first page for many yahoo searches. Same keywords..
Tom