Parking domains

[ogito]

Where do you park the domains you buy?
How can you measure roughly how much traffic could a domain get?

[Westech]

For parking, I've heard good things about sedo.com (or .co.uk). Another option is to just point them to another one of your sites to utilize the extra traffic.

For measuring type-in traffic, I'd say the Overture keyword tracker tool might be your best bet. ( http://inventory.overture.com ). Search for the full domain with extension, for example, example.com. This will tell you how many times in the last month people searched for example.com on overture and it's partner search sites.

What good is this? Well, most people searching for "example.com" in a search engine are doing it because they wanted to go to example.com but got mixed up and typed the URL in the search bar rather than the location bar.

Generally actual type-ins are quite a bit higher than the number overture reports, since a lot more people will type it in the actual location bar, or in a non-overture search engine.

This method isn't good for finding an exact (or even a rough) estimate of what the actual type-in traffic will be, but it can help you compare potential type-ins for one domain against potential type-ins for another.

For example: Overture shows that crazymonkeygames.com had 3,079 searches in May 2005 (the most recent month available.) It shows that google.com had 9,169,583. Obviously, from this we can assume that if you could snag the domain google.com you would get a lot more type-in traffic than if you could snag crazymonkeygames.com .

[Cutter]

The truth is most type-in domains that get a significant amount of traffic are already registered. The one exception is new products, ideas, ect -- but you have to watch out for trademarks here.

If you have a lot of names I would park them on a service such as sedo -- but I'd move toward developing the best ones as soon as possible. Domain names appear to play a very significant role in ranking on both MSN and Yahoo so you don't want to miss out on that potential traffic.

[ogito]

Thanks for the tips guys !