Could ranking problem be caused by Parked Domain?

[bjalc2011]

I've been investigating a serious Google ranking drop for a small website in the UK. They used to rank top 5 for about 10 main keywords and overnight on 24/3/12 they lost rankings. They have not ranked in top100 since. Their pages are still indexed and they can still be found for their brand/domain name so they have not been removed completely.

I've coverered all the normal issues you would expect to look for and no serious errors exist that would lead to what in effect looks like a penalty.

The investigation has led to a an issue about their domain registration setup. The whois record (at domaintools) shows the status as "Registered and Parked or Redirected" which seems a bit unusual. Checking the registration details they had DNS settings pointing correctly to the webhost but also had web forwarding to the domain registrar's standard parked domain page.

The domain registrar has suggested that this duplication could have caused ranking problems. What do you think? Is this a realistic reason for their ranking loss?

Thanks

[AlanMosley]

Could very well be,

Google has stated that they penalized m,any sites because the wrongly thought they were parked

http://searchengineland.com/dropped-in-rankings-google-mistake-over-parked-domains-118979?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main