Yes, it happens sometimes… Google does indeed rank generic keyword .COM domains that are parked. Not all of the domains parked in the world are penalized / banned. Of course these domains only rank for the exact match root keyword. Nothing more, nothing less, since there isn’t any content to draw in longtail traffic.

But why do they rank to begin with… WTF? Makes no sense. It’s a good question… Really, it has nothing to do with the parking page setup, or the content on the site. It has nothing to do with how competitive the root keyword is… The most important factor is the incoming links. If the parked domain has lots of “linkjuice” then it can indeed rank at the top on Google.

Just the other day I was watching this music video below with Shaggy in it… Then I went to search for Shaggy on google.com and saw the domain Shaggy.com rank right in the middle of the first page. The domain of course is parked, with DomainSponsor, but it has lots of one-way links pointing to it from some pretty “authoritative” sites so Google takes that into consideration and since it is an exact match domain + has some linkjuice = ranking.

Then I was checking how ForeignAutoParts.com was doing just the other day… A domain I sold last month which is parked. Acquired it for mid $x,xxx back in January…. Was surprised to discover it holding down the top spot for root keyword over at Google and one of the top spots at Bing.com as well.

I get inquiries every now and then from people wanting me to somehow “rank” their parked domains… People wanna drop lots of cash on this stuff, but unfortunately ranking parked pages is a bitch and very hard to do. There is cloaking and other ways to be able to do so if you absolutely set your mind to it, but really, the examples I provided are just the exception.. Not the norm. It does happen though, all thanks to links from the previous lifetime of the domain. ForeignAutoParts.com for example was a foreign auto parts store since 2000.. So it has that going for it.