The following originated as a portion of a conversation between myself and a representative from Parked.com, the domain parking firm that recently acquired domain development company WhyPark (WhyPark.com).

The representative had contacted me roughly a week before news of the sale broke, in an effort to persuade me to give Parked.com’s domain parking service a fair shot. I had not been particularly pleased with the other domain parking companies I either currently have names parked with or have in the past, so I was definitely open to an alternative.

I did mention to her during our initial conversation that I had been very pleased with the versatility of the WhyPark platform in the way it enabled the domainer to pursue traffic from search in a way parking companies had not successfully done before. I had told her that I would call her in a week or two to follow-up, but then news of the acquisition hit and I figured doing so was no longer necessary. She recently emailed me just to touch base and do a follow-up, and the following was my response to that particular message.

Since my response to her email essentially constituted something of a 60-day post-sale analysis (only it hasn’t quite been 60 days yet – more like 50 and change), I decided to post my response publicly as a breakdown of the positives and negatives as seen by me – the WhyPark developer/publisher. While it was originally written specifically for an individual, after reading it over, it was clear that the message would be quite appropriate fodder for this blog, as it serves as a nice follow-up article to this post concerning the sale of WhyPark to Parked.com.

Please accept my apology for not getting back with you sooner. The truth is, I assumed there was no need to follow-up as your company effectively annexed the bulk of the genuinely for-profit domain names in my portfolio by default with Parked.com’s acquisition of WhyPark, which if I recall occurred roughly a week or so after I initially spoke with you.

I am currently spending most of my free time developing the 80+ domains already in the WhyPark system, and will add more once my revenue goals for those already in the system start being met on a consistent basis.

On that note, I have observed a steep decline in traffic, ad clicks and EPC over the past four weeks or so following a brief spike across the board that immediately followed the news of the acquisition.

This is understandably disturbing and worrisome, as I have been continuing to add to my sites already in the WhyPark system, however about a month ago my revenue and traffic stopped climbing and have actually fallen off substantially since late May-early June.

As the revenue from advertising and affiliate links is not sufficient to cover the maintenance of the portfolio, I have limited time with which to pursue further development, and I want to be doubly-sure that my time spent developing my domains isn’t going to waste.

There are still a number of serious problems with the WhyPark platform from an SEO perspective, which have only been exacerbated since the Parked acquisition and subsequent spike in syndication of articles within the system (i.e. duplicate content issues rendering custom pages irrelevant or at best tedious and inefficient as long as the severely over-syndicated articles remain present on the site dominating the default navigation and internal link structure).

There are a disturbingly high number of issues such as the one described above that leave me wary of investing too much time and/or money into a system that appears to be holding itself back with its own internal flaws. The bottom line is that 40 articles is too many for a site featuring 5-15 custom pages – particularly when the keywords being targeted are even remotely competitive. The ratio of duplicate-to-unique content is still insufficient (even with say, 15 unique articles) if the 40 syndicated articles all appeared on anywhere from dozens-to-hundreds of sites prior to being syndicated on a given WhyPark customer’s site. The result is Google won’t even bother indexing the custom pages (and sometimes it won’t index any custom pages if the duped content is deemed severe enough). That is, it won’t bother indexing them until the content appears on some unrelated spammer’s site who stole it from the WP site’s custom page.

That issue has to be addressed if you all are going to continue to move forward. It could be solved simply by allowing the user to set a max number of syndicated articles and blocking access to any articles not specifically appearing in the site map (with the exception of pages not in the site map that contain inbound links from other sites).

For what it’s worth, I am quite fond of the WP system, but having been with them for several years now, I can’t help but second guess a lot of the decisions made over the past couple of years – at least those pertaining to SEO. That’s not to say the SEO efforts were all bad, but there have been a few times when I’ve honestly wondered if anyone over there (WhyPark) had ever even bothered to Google the term (SEO).

That said, overall I have been pleased with the WhyPark service and would like to at some point expand my usage of the WP platform to host at least another 100-200 domains not currently within the system. Also, for what it’s worth, I am fond of the people at WhyPark and am far from a disgruntled customer. However, I do have some qualms about continuing to invest long hours into development through said platform because traffic and earnings figures from the last 6 weeks have been going in the wrong direction, and until certain systemic flaws are smoothed over, those flaws will continue to hinder mine (and other WP domainers’) efforts to achieve medium to long-term success within targeted search. The volume of syndicated content can’t be such so as to require the domainer to add 30 custom pages (assuming reader comments will be scarce) just to avoid tripping some automatic duplicate content filter. FWIW, data is increasingly suggesting that both Google and Microsoft search engines are issuing site-level punishments for being on the wrong end of that ratio and they are doing so with a heavy hand and iron fist.

I am finding that too many of my WP sites don’t seem to get any quality traffic from any search engine besides Yahoo, and finding that duplicate content issues are one of two main factors for this. The other factor is the fact that seemingly all social bookmarking (aka: social media, social news, etc.) sites now reject WhyPark URLs automatically, stealing the content while removing the destination URL from the link. It is now Parked’s responsibility to figure out a way to help these sites discern between custom pages and syndicated content and do whatever is necessary to persuade Digg, Pligg, Propeller, Reddit, etc. (all the ones offering dofollow links to submissions’ source URL’s) to allow submissions of the former (custom pages).

As it stands now, simply using a WhyPark-hosted domain puts the developer at a major disadvantage for SEO purposes to the guy who simply copies the same article from some article directory and pastes it in his own site at his own page with his own (non-WP URL) because the non-WhyPark domainer can submit his articles and build links through social media while the WhyPark domainer cannot since WP URLs are filtered out by all Pligg sites and most major non-Pligg dofollow sites within the same category.

I don’t know if any of this really addresses the questions you had asked originally, but I hope it helps nonetheless.

If you’d like me to elaborate on any of this or delve into some other areas not mentioned in this email, consider having someone from Parked contact me with an offer for me to formally consult with your company on SEO-related matters. There’s plenty more where this came from, and it is my confident belief that my suggestions contained within this message (as well as numerous others not yet mentioned) would significantly improve the services offered by your firm and greatly increase profitability for all involved parties.

Best Regards,

Peter Egan Jr.

GoDotYourself.com
1-504-554-0242
godotyourself@gmail.com
See Original Post: WhyPark Acquired by Parked.com