SEDO.com Domain Name Parking Review

For years, SEDO has been the place for countless premium domain name auctions ("premium" meaning extremely high priced domains), you've undoubtedly heard about the site in various marketing and domaining forums across the internet. One of SEDO's 'bread and butter' services, beyond domain auctions, is their domain name parking service.

To cut to the chase, I gave SEDO a good run several years ago, and re-visited the site to take a look at new features and to test out some short-term domain parking results for comparison purposes. So far, I've covered a full Parked.com review and a NameDrive.com review -- here's a more in-depth one for SEDO!

At first glance, parking your domain names on SEDO is a pain because it's just so damn hard to figure out how to use their website at first -- beyond the fact that the website is in desperate need of a re-design, it is a navigational nightmare. Just by human instinct, you'll want to click "Park Domains," which is the 2nd main menu option in big bold text. If you do, it will take you to a 5-step overview of what domain parking is...which is utterly confusing if you think that by step 5, you'll be taken to a domain parking screen (which you won't).

If you thought the left-hand menu would have taken you there, you would have been in for a 2nd round of frustration: the menu options for "Domain Management," "Domain Parking" and "Domain Parking (old)" will not take you there, either (who knows why on earth there's a "domain parking" and "domain parking (old)" as it would have made sense for them to phase out the old one, and redirect it to the new page).

What you'll need to do if you want to start parking domains on SEDO is to create and account, sign in, then hover over the dropdown menu titled "My SEDO," and choose the first option, "Add Domains." Here, you can simply type in your domain names, and be taken to a screen for further settings. On the proceeding screen, you'll be able to set domains to be up for sale (along with a set price or minimum price), and tweak some very elementary settings for the parked page itself.

Don't let your first-time navigation woes turn you away from SEDO -- read on about how the service actually works!

After parking a page (or by simply going to "My SEDO >> Domain Parking" and clicking the pencil icon next to any of your domain names), you'll be taken to a dashboard where you can tweak your domain's features. Here are the main options you can change:

• Parking Layout: You'll be able to select one of nine templates to change the appearance of your parked page. Beyond selecting a layout, you'll have no further control over how the parked page looks, aside from being able to choose a "main image," if the template you chose includes one.


• Master Link: This is the one main keyword you'd like your domain's parked page to "target."


• Related Links: This option allows you to choose up to 10 additional links related to the topic of your domain name. So, if you're parking HDTV.com, you'd want to choose "tv, hdtv, television" and 7 other keywords. It helps your overall strategy by making your page look more relevant to a visitor. These links can also be disabled if they were manually added by you.

Remember how we clicked the "pencil" icon next to a domain name? If you click the "i" icon that's right next to it, it will bring you to a statistics page for your domain name. The customizable graph allows you to compare two metrics amongst the following selections: queries, clicks, CTR (click-through rate), EPC (earnings per click), RPM (revenue per mille) and earnings, while viewing them as a bar or line graph.

SEDO's visitor origin map is a rudimentary world map that gives you a general picture of which country your visitors have come from.

Finally, the "keyword details" section lists all variations of keywords that have been used to get to your parked page from search engines.

All of these statistics can be sorted by day, month and other options. Much like what other domain parking services offer, SEDO lets you create "folders" and categorize your domains within them to make everything a little bit easier to find as your portfolio grows.

If you own an IDN or international domain name (that's a domain name containing non-english alphabetical characters, such as accented letters, Russian or Serbian cryllic letters, Asian characters, Hindi or Arabic script, etc.), SEDO is the largest domain parking service in the world that accepts these domains. Parked.com does not accept them whatsoever, and NameDrive does not correctly display most of these characters.

Not only does SEDO accept IDN's, it even allows you to customize your landing page to include that domain's country's language in ad results! This truly is the best and most comprehensive parking service for IDNs...I highly recommend it, even if you only use SEDO for this sole purpose.

(Above): Take a look at a few of SEDO's parked pages: in general, they're very basic, but have good typography and coloring. Once again, parked SEDO pages that have images will allow you to have a choice of which image you'd like to display.