Getting parked domains indexed?

[Xava]

Is it possible to get parked domains indexed into the search engines?

I'll explain more below...

I have a client who owns a domain that features products from a couple of her companies. She then bought two other domain names (which were her two company names) and parked them on the main domain.

She's been giving out these domain names to her clients however her clients seem to put the domain names into the Google search instead of typing it in the address bar. Why they do this, I don't know.

Because the parked domains have no content, they aren't indexed in the search results and aren't being found by her clients.

Is there anyway to get those parked domains into the index or do they have to have their own websites with their own content? Can you have one page on those parked domains or is that considered bad SEO? (I think they call them doorway pages).

Thanks for your input!

[Menard]

Do you mean that the domains are parked or are they redirecting to her main domain? If they are redirecting, depending on the registrar, she could try having it redirect within a frame. Some registrars (Namecheap) offer the ability to add metatags to a redirection frame. I don't know if this will get it indexed, and I doubt it will as it will either appear as a duplicate page, a page with only a head, or simply as a redirect, and search engines don't like any of those.

I'm not too certain why she would give out urls for domains with no content.

As for why people search rather than putting the url into the address bar is because it is not their responsibility to put a url into an address bar. Search engines are for the purpose of finding sites on the internet. If someone is looking for Amazon, eBay, or to even find a free web portal at http://freewebportal.to.md/ (oh, I am sooo bad ), they are going to search for it and not type urls into the address bar. Expecting a customer or client to manually type a url into an address bar and blaming it on them if they don't is simply irresponsible and poor relations. I'm certain, though, that was just an off-hand comment and not really an expression of attitude.

One suggestion I can give (as I just thought of this) is that she can submit the links to seo friendly directories, and maybe even in a signature in posts on forums like this. Even if the url does not get indexed, the link to it will and will allow someone to find it by doing a search, then they will be able to get to the page by going through the directory or forum. She can also set up a doorway page as you mentioned; not a redirect page, but a page with the two links on it, and some content to get it crawled, so that it can get indexed and provide a way for people to find the link via a search.

[Andy]

Because the parked domains have no content, they aren't indexed in the search results and aren't being found by her clients.

Newbies to the web tend to enter urls into the browser search box since they don't understand the concept of hyperlinks.

If you have good domain name hosting, you should be able to create a title and description tag. You could include some keyword-rich text in there. Search engines pick up on title text and description tag and show these in search results.

Use masking rather than re-directs. Masking frames the site and allows for a no-frames area in the code to describe the site. This should get the domain name indexed. Avoid duplicate content and ensure that the no-frames text is related to the destination site. Staff from the search engine may vet your content to ensure compliance with their rules.

Check with the search engine webmaster guidelines at the various SEs to check out the latest advice.

[Gracia]

Without content they aren't going to indexed. Even if the one page websites get indexed they won't rank well for anything so it is just as good as not being indexed. And since you may risk being seen as using doorway pages you risk getting the domains blacklisted so it isn't worth doing.