Detecting parked domains

Wed Aug 2 21:03:12 UTC 2006

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > Has anyone come up with a quick method for detecting if a domain
> > name is parked, but is not being used except displaying ads?
>
> AFAICT, the main challenge is to define what "parked" means in the
> context of your application.

There seems to be DNSBL's for every other thing, I was expecting to find
one for parked domain names or the server IP addresses used.

This was for personal interest, rather than a commercial opportunity.  I'm
a lousy typist and its unlikely change. But I can write computer
applications.  I'd rather get a message my application can process
rather than relying on a human.

My preference is "legitimate" domain parking firms included a
standardized piece of meta-data my application could detect and use
as "this domain doesn't really exist." Sorta of a variant of the
web robots.txt file, but I prefer it to be application independent,
instead of assuming everything is HTTP Port 80.  Perhaps start with a
standard record associated with the parked domain, i.e.
_notexist.example.com.

For less legitimate domain parking (i.e. typo-squatters), its a different
problem.