Google states parked domains = spam

Google’s spam page claims parked domains are web spam.

Here’s something interesting to start your week.

Google has a page regarding “Fighting Spam” referring to pages designed to trick search engines such as cloaking and hidden text.

Listed right there underneath “Types of Spam” is this:

It’s completely understandable that Google doesn’t want to index parked domains. But to label them as spam? I take two issues with that.

1. In order to be web spam, the creator of the page ought to be trying to game Google to get the page indexed. Domain parkers don’t do that. They used to, but now we know our pages aren’t going to show up in Google, and there’s nothing the big players are doing to parked pages to try to circumvent that.

2. If a parked page is inherently spam, then Google powers a big chunk of spam. It’s Google ads that power over half of parked domains.

(Thanks Joe Politzer)