Parked Domains and Local SEO

[Diamond.Dog]

Hi,

I wanted to know what your thoughts were on **Parked Domains **and Local SEO. I came across a company that has a lot of parked domains that were created for different countries. i.e. xxxxx.co.uk, xxxxx.ch, xxxxx.com etc.

The content they load are from the main domain xxxxx.com

• I went to a country specific Google search, for instance google.co.uk and google.ch
• Searched for the company name and xxxxx.com showed up, not the parked domains that existed for each "country"
• No analytics exist as the tracking code is on xxxxx.com so I can't see if any specific traffic goes to xxxxx.ch, or other domains.
• From my understand, parked domains lead to unnecessary duplicate content. So why have them? Simply setup a redirect to xxxxx.com from the parked domain.
• But are there benefits for Local SEO? Search engines like google will still see the domain as a separate entity if no redirect is in place. If so, I realise content has to be unique..but it raises a question...
• Why have parked domains at all apart from stopping your competitors or users typing other variance of your URL?

What do you guys think?

[RyanScollon]

Do they only offer their service in one city/country? It's hard to say why they would do that, but in my honest opinion, I don't think it will have any benefit for their local SEO. Like you said, they could be doing it to stop competitors from using the other domain variations, or they could be targeting people from other countries. I guess it all depends on your answer to my original question.

Hope this helps

[Diamond.Dog]

Actually they are a global company, but for their country specific domains they are currently just showing the same content as the .com

My thinking was whether google.CH would prefer a .CH domain over a .com domain even if the content is the same? If so local domains that are country specific would work (let's assume all domains have 0 back links)