It is the responsibility of domain owners to ensure their pay per click links are set accurately and the “for sale” link (if applicable) is working as anticipated. It is a good idea to check on this after a domain name inquiry.
Last week, I sold a domain name to another investor. When I owned the domain name, I had it parked, and I forward inquiries for almost all of my parked domain names to an Embrace.com inquiry page. For some reason, when the buyer added the domain name to his parking account after I deleted it, the link to Embrace.com remained. I have reported this issue to the parking company.
Another issue I sometimes face is that I occasionally have domain names rejected from my parking account because they are already in someone else’s account. I am notified that the domain name listing was rejected, but I sometimes overlook the notice in the email and assume the domain name was added. When this happens and it is not corrected, I would likely not earn any income from parking nor would I receive any purchase inquiries unless the former owner sends them to me.
A final issue that is less common is setting keywords. If a domain name is parked via parking company and the buyer intends to keep it there, it is important to check on keyword settings. The former owner may have had a keyword lock to show a category of advertisements (or prevent certain keywords), and that setting may not stick when the domain name is added to a new account.
The first issue seems like a technical issue that the parking company needs to address. I am not sure if it happens elsewhere, but I think when a domain name is deleted from a parking account, the settings should all revert to a default setting. The second issue is the domain owner’s fault, but it a mistake that can be very easy to make. The final issue is also the domain owner’s responsibility to fix.
Domain parking is such an easy thing. Add a domain name to a parking account and maybe change the nameservers. Most of the time, this goes off without a hitch. On the rare occasion that there is an issue, it can be tough to spot unless you are looking for them.
Great tips for parkers! I generally don’t have to worry about any of the parking pitfalls since I develop or create my own landing pages for my domains. Personally, I think more people should explore/test doing it in-house instead of 3rd party. At least then, you aren’t at the mercy of someone elses code/server/etc.
Reverting to default parking settings for a domain after an account change – this is properly the responsibility of the parking provider, not the domain owner.
In practice, the UI will rarely allow checking such settings except 1 domain at a time. And repetitive-motion tasks like that are impractical for portfolios larger than, say, 50 domains.