I have all my names listed and parked on Afternic.com. With their Afternic Choice program, you can choose from their own house parking and two other leading parking services, Domain Sponsor and Fabulous. And, it’s not all or nothing–you can split up your portfolio among the three.

I had originally set all my names to the house parking option, which worked out well. But,after reading good reviews about the other two parking options, I thought I’d give Domain Sponsor a try. I used the global edit tool to make the quick change to the entire portfolio.

Over the next few days I periodically checked some of my names to see how well Domain Sponsor had optimized my pages. But, no optimization had occurred on any I checked, and the pages had irrelevant, generic links on them. Of course, no one was clicking any of them. In the meantime, I went to various forums, and contacted Afternic and Domain Sponsor, to figure out why the pages were not optimizing. The people on the forums weren’t quite sure. But, Domain Sponsor wrote back and told me that their “auto-optimization system takes about 7-10 days to reach full returns.”

I had since done a test with the partner Fabulous, and it had taken less than a day to optimize my pages. Seeing as I didn’t want to wait up to ten days to start getting clicks, I then switched all my names to Fabulous and within a day all was well.

Thinking about what Domain Sponsor had told me about it taking 7-10 days to “reach full returns,” I wondered if that was supposed to mean it would take that long for them to get to the page, or that long to complete an optimization process that began earlier. If it had begun on day 2, like Fabulous or house parking did, and then simply improved over the next 7-10 days, that would have been fine. But, my concern was that I had names with very clear keywords in them, like for example, “solar energy,” which were not getting optimized. A third word in the names was often rather generic, and so would not have thrown off the optimizer. After too many days of looking at my Solar Energy names providing terrible links, and after watching both Fabulous and House Parking show great links within 24 hours, I had to make the switch away from Domain Sponsor.

My understanding is that Domain Sponsor does provide excellent optimization, and I don’t really doubt that it would have been just fine after ten days. I just felt it would be informative for me to let readers know about the time lag so that if they really wanted Domain Sponsor as their parking partner, not to give up too soon. As for me, I just have little patience for long waits.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, parking, afternic, domain sponsor, fabulous