"What is a parked name? is webhealth.com parked?" A parked name is essentially landing page with advertising and no original content. It can be the hoster/ISP parking the domain or it can be a user monetizing it. From search engine building work I've done, the same elements tend to appear in these pages which makes it easier for spiders to spot them. It has different characteristics to an active domain in that certain keywords and links exist, almost exclusively on these sites.
***FS*** A landing page with advertising and no original content?.. Congratulations, you have just described Google.com :) All joking aside. Webhealth could be viewed as content or parking depending on your perspective. It is a true original content site, but I own it so my desire is to make money from the paid search listings.. Its goal is the same as a parked name.. yet it's sub-pages can be used to provide useful original content to tens of thousands of domains names.
"Who gets to call the line? Once a name is not parked any longer who turns it on again?" In this scenario, it is the search engine operators that decide. A domain that goes active should be detected in the next spider run - that's if it is included in the target list. If it has changed sufficiently and does not meet the set of rules for a parked domain (perhaps including the nameservers), it may get released into the main index. Part of this would, I think, tie in to Google's work dealing with domain name history as an element of a website's trustworthiness.
***FS*** Firstly you are confusing 'search' and navigation.. I understand that you're intimating a merger of yhoo/msft would somehow remove that barrier and give the combined entity carte-blanche to change navigation with impunity, but that's just not going to happen.. If it did, the rules could be gamed as they are in my webhealth.com example. There are too many parties affected.. too much money, too many operators to randomly turn on/off sites even though it 'could' be done from a technical perspective.
"Would google sue if 20% of their revenue went away?" If that 20% is taken from it by Microsoft/Yahoo, it would probably get just as aggressive. And what worries me is that the domaining business is stuck right between these behemoths. It might work out for the best and turn into more of a sellers market for advertising web real estate. But if Microsoft does take over Yahoo, developing content on sites will become a far more important part of monetization.
***FS*** That aggressiveness unwinds their browser's strength which is unhampered navigation. Imagine 20 million domain names featuring a logo "best viewed in new unrestricted browser" I think you are underestimating the user's desire to surf an unrestricted Internet and the potential reach of millions of domain holders to do something about keeping navigation open/free. There are significant forces which desire to keep users coming to their network of websites ungamed.. I agree with your "rock/hardplace" comments from a monetization perspective, but disagree from a 'navigation' perspective. If you own the sites, you own the ability to make money with them through advertising of one kind or another.. Again, I agree it is "possible" to game navigation (and has been since web 1.0), I just don't see the closure of unrestricted browsing as realistic. Content is cheap and easy to duplicate in today's day and age.
"but if they go too far we will sue them and win" Microsoft are the masters of taking out the competition - where are Lotus 123, DR-Dos, Wordstar, Wordperfect, Netscape now? If the whole thing ends up in court, everyone loses money except the lawyers and there is no guarantee of a clear resolution at the end. In the meantime, the domaining business gets put under a lot of pressure. If the search engines managed to produce a natural language search plugin for browsers, that would give them the lock-in they need in the guise of helping the users. Though that would be the Holy Grail of search engine development and would be heavily tied in with the search engines.
***FS*** Screw us once shame on you, screw us twice shame on "us" I suppose. To be fair, those were companies with lots of moving parts and very little free cashflow. You can cripple domains [as an industry], but you can't kill them. Domains make their traffic/revenue in the most benign of ways 'now'. There is gaming at the browser level now and still the visitors find a way through. A concerted suit from the public and private domain operators would gain traction and may even occur relating to some of the fringe shaving going on in Vista (timeout), and IE7 error search now. Wholesale attempted blockage would galvanize many fragmented parties.. Nothing like money [or lack of it] to engage people :) Again, none of those companies you mentioned were as distributed or made the kind of free cashflow as the domain industry. I think people have too much invested in branding their .coms to roll over.. but I look forward to watching the evolution which absolutely will contain unpredictable twists and turns.
Perhaps the point that I had in mind was that all markets, even the domains market, are vulnerable to change. Often the speed of adapting to that change is the critical factor in survival. A change of the magnitude of Microsoft taking over Yahoo has the capability to seriously alter the landscape of the domains business and domains monetization. And it might be the small players who get hit hardest.
***FS*** I fully agree with you first two sentences just above, but completely disagree with your last two. Domain names already function at the bare-din level. There are too many people making too much money in too many countries for wholesale browser blockage to occur unchallenged. I agree that the search engines will block every last parked domain from their algo (in search).. but that only serves to embolden their users to go around the engine. I can only tell you what I have seen and what I believe. If I bought into your theory I would switch my model to selling domain names for $1000 here and $20,000 there. That of course is always an option if the most draconian browser changes occur and would provide convenient fuel to funding a lawsuit. That may be my last best point. None of the tens of thousands of people who send us unsolicited offers for names, do so for type-in traffic. they all want to build a site for Google to index. That flood of people is intensifying and floats all boats. In a way domains are like the whale that the Eskimos bring in to feed and clothe a village, the blubber of the whale even providing fuel oil for their lamps, the bones providing tools to make knives..
Direct Navigation, Name Sales, SEO, SEM .... domain names can be used in so many different (yet foundational) ways to make money.
The question is not just what is a parked page, but what is a user expecting when they find themselves on a parked page? If they typed in 'dogkennels.com' and find themselves on a page of relevent ads for dog kennels, you could argue the user experience was a good one.
If they followed a link from a site on dog kennels with the anchor text "Learn out more about Bob's great dog kennel solution!" and find themselves on a parked page because the name dropped and was picked up? I can't speak for "the user", but I know *I* never appreciate that.
I never buy domains based on inbound links. As I wrote in an comment on Sal's blog a few weeks back - it would be extremely simple for someone to write a webmaster tool to check all outbound links for domains now on parking pages and notify the webmaster so they can be cleaned up. There is also motifivation to do this, SERP judges you on your outbound links as well as inbound these days. Sure people could find their way around them with URL redirects, non-standard nameservers and whatever, but this would still take a large chunk out of parking. The tool may already exist and I just don't know about it. Google may even be working on it, they clearly don't like parking pages.
Posted by: DP | May 07, 2007 at 02:39 PM
A "parked domain" has nothing to do with what is on the web page. Technically, all domains which resolve to a nameserver is "parked". But in the domain industry, we've began to associate it with a page at a parking company.
Posted by: Tia Wood | May 07, 2007 at 03:00 PM