Are there any SEO implications to switching a parked domain to an addon domain

Question

I have parked domain on my site that redirects to a sub-folder. When you navigate the the URL you get something that looks like;

www.mainsite.com/parked_domain/whatever_page.html

The site was initially set up like this because the webhost at the time charge an additional fee for addon domains so the above was seen as an acceptable compromise.

Now the site is on a new host and addon domains are free. I wanted to switch the set up using an addon domain so navigating to the URL looks like;

www.parked_domain.com/whatever_page.html

Would this impact anything?

Answer 1

First off, I've never heard of something called "addon domain". To someone like me who owns 30+ domains, the first I'm hearing of it shouldn't be on this site. I believe you made a good choice in leaving the old hosting company as they were trying to charge money for a non-service. That being said... To the question at hand.

There should not be any adverse (on the contrary, actually) effects to removing the parked_domain part of your URL structure. What you should do however, is create 401 URL re-write's for each of your old pages, to the new ones. If any pages were in fact indexed, that is. You could do a quick check on this by googling: site:www.yourdomain.com

So /parked_domain/whatever.html should 401 to /whatever.html.

Answer 2

The parked domains will gain a little more value in terms of hosting an actual page, before you had no pages hosted as it was a redirect. Your best way forward now would be to get a simple one page with content on the parked sites just so Google can age them and ultimately when you do get to use them your get good results.