Buying old domains for SEO benefit

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by oldbrad

I read up a little about that in the past. Supposedly, from things i read, some se's may be able to tell that a domain has changed owners whether from spidering the whois info or by noticing a large change in the sites design and content, thereby starting over as a newly registered domain.

Brad

Good points everyone. What I am wondering now is... Why would Google care if you sold your domain as long as the site remained the quality content site it already was before selling the domain. For example, what if a name brand site like eBay was sold to another huge corporation.

Would they then lose their search engine rankings or positions over the transfer? I don't think so, but I'm no expert.

[Linkster]

Lowry - the experiences I have so far ( and we did just buy some sites) - is that everything is transferred over with no problems - as long as the domain and site were in good standing to begin with

The primary algorithm issue was with domains only - no site - and the filtering was put in primarily for domains that were expiring that people were catching on the drops - that had old DMOZ, etc type links and could be used to boost your own sites with very little work - Googles initial response (and this was confirmed by their representative on a board a few years back) was to automatically drop all link and other values when a domain that went into its expiration period was bought - this was the original "sandbox" - at the same time Google became accredited by ICANN as a full blown registrar and started incorporating other parts of the whois database into their algo checks

I can also tell you from talking with some people that I know that do buy old expiring domains that Googles algo doesnt always work

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by Linkster

Lowry - the experiences I have so far ( and we did just buy some sites) - is that everything is transferred over with no problems - as long as the domain and site were in good standing to begin with

Thanks Linkster, that is what I suspected and it makes perfect sense to me.

Originally Posted by Linkster

The primary algorithm issue was with domains only - no site - and the filtering was put in primarily for domains that were expiring that people were catching on the drops - that had old DMOZ, etc type links and could be used to boost your own sites with very little work - Googles initial response (and this was confirmed by their representative on a board a few years back) was to automatically drop all link and other values when a domain that went into its expiration period was bought - this was the original "sandbox" - at the same time Google became accredited by ICANN as a full blown registrar and started incorporating other parts of the whois database into their algo checks

I can also tell you from talking with some people that I know that do buy old expiring domains that Googles algo doesnt always work

I remember reading about people trying to get a boost off older expiring domains, and I even gave it a shot once. I didn't see anything happen on my end so I quickly gave up chasing that method. Very good info Linkster, thanks again.