I believe Google handles 204 codes the same as 200. They index a page with basically no content. Unless someone links to a 204 page however, Google will never see one by your example. Google is not out and about running searches on websites to see what comes up to find more content to index. If someone were to search on your site and get a 204, then link to it, then yeah, Google could crawl and index it. In that case though you might see it in your webmaster tools under crawl errors. Then you could noindex it or block it with robots.txt or something else.

Instead of using the htaccess file, you should download a wordpress plugin called SImple 301 Redirects. It's very easy. Maybe if you do the 301 reidrects at the wordpress plugin level then wordpress can handle them better.

Can't you look up the source code of the page with the link to you? In there you should find your link at

When leaving blog comments, isntead of trying to get a link out of them in any way, simply be a normal person, give your opinion of the blog post, then encourage readers to search something. If you have coupon sites this works great because you can comment on a blog in your industry, then tell anyone if they are going to buy the product to be sure to Google for some coupons first, because they can save money that way. No link, no brand mention, but you get more search traffic for a phrase.

There is SEO benefit to forwarding these domains if they have any incoming links. If so, a 301 redirect to your main domain could send some link juice and help rankings.

If these parked domains aren't even indexed by Google and have no links, then there is no SEO value in a 301 redirect because Google won't even know about it anyway. I would still do it as there is no harm that could be done, that's for sure.

I would recommend against doing any kind of meta refresh, as Google frowns upon those. Just 301 redirect the parked domains to your live website and it will either do nothing or help a little, but it can't hurt.

I haven't seen any impact on my sites or on my day to day searches. I think most people took the line that 12% of queries were affected to mean that 12% of websites were affected. Far from true. I think while 12% of search queries may have seen the rankings visibly change, this does not mean 12% of Google's indexed sites were affected in some way. I think this was a handful of sites that accounted for a lot of long tail search results.