If you are like most people either in business on the web or in business generally, you may have accumulated some extra domain names. And, like most people, you might tend to leave those domain names in a dormant or parked status. GoDaddy is a perfect example: they offer free domain parking for domains purchased through their service.

Domain Parking: Almost a Scam

If you use domain parking services, it really isn’t a service at all– the parking service places ads on your domain and does not share of the ad revenue with you–I wonder how much revenue GoDaddy earns in the aggregate from the 100s of thousands, or millions, of domain names parked there. Also, parked domains in most cases will not be indexed by search engines. So, in the eyes of a search engine, a parked domain doesn’t exist.

Best Approach for Parked Domains

The better approach is to “park” your domain by yourself. Set up a very simple page, or better a few pages with some text that is original and contextually relevant to the domain name itself. You can even place some Google Adsense Advertisements on the site to earn a few dollars a month. Meanwhile, the search engines will crawl and index your site because of the original content they find there. Then, when you finally go live with your domain, you’ll have an indexing history—old sites with some age and history always outrank brand-new sites.

An extra tip: always leave your contact information easily findable on a parked domain– you never know when someone will want to offer money for it.

Google has confirmed long ago that webpage load times will be used as a factor in the calculation of its AdWords Quality Score index–meaning that a faster load time can save you money on your AdWords budget.

You can use the tool for free at Pingdom. Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll see.

What’s a good load time? You want the last item on the page (the bottom of the list) to load in under 5 seconds.

One of the popular sites used by many is Copyscape. It is a free tool that allows you to post your text content on a box and in return, the tool would check for other websites with similar texts.

Another free tool that can be used is the Xenu Link Sleuth. This is a tool that can be downloaded to check for broken links. This tool often yields title tags, formats, sizes and URLs that can be exported to excel files and these can be sorted to check for duplicates. A similar tool works this way and it is called Yahoo Explorer. The only difference is Yahoo Explorer does not detect broken links.

Google also offers tools to check for duplicate content. The Google Webmaster Tools can be accessed through the main Google page (google.com/webmasters). One has to go to the Diagnostics page and choose HTML suggestions. Click on duplicate title tag to proceed to the download link for the table. Apart from these free tools, there are also a lot of reliable paid duplicate checking tools available online.

There are many types of duplicate contents that one needs to be aware of. Various elements of a website need to be considered as there are millions of websites in the World Wide Web.

Here are some of the elements that need to be checked for duplication:

1. Title Tags. Many websites out there tend to use the title tag over and over again throughout the entire website. This is a form of duplication and needs to be avoided. Plus, with the millions of websites published on the web, title tags often get duplicated.

2. Dynamic URLs. Since the content of dynamic pages changes depending on the data base driving the results of the site, the possibilities of duplicate contents are greater.

3. Meta descriptions. Subjects of the content of a website need meta descriptions, the summary of the content of the page. Oftentimes, because the topics discussed in a website have many similarities with other web pages, meta descriptions also tend to get duplicated.

4. Product descriptions. Websites of product resellers often get their product descriptions from the original manufacturer of the goods. Since there could be many resellers for the same products online, the descriptions are often duplicated.

For any SEO professionals, making sure that the websites they are marketing is unique and free from duplicates help a lot. The popularity and ranking of the site is often at stake. Of course, there are also the copyright infringement issues that are pretty common in the World Wide Web at the moment.  Make sure that you check your contents for any duplication.

One of the greatest resources that we use here is Google’s “Webmaster Central Channel” on Youtube.com.  If you could ask a Google employee a question like, “how can I remove old content from Google’s index?”, wouldn’t that be valuable? Well, that question and 100s of others are answered on Google’s Webmaster Central Channel on Youtube by none other than Google employee Matt Cutts.

The channel features video blogs by Google employees answering user-submitted questions. Check it out, we are sure you will find it valuable.