Let's say during one person's online history he created three websites, all registered in his name and those three sites acheived homepages of PR9, PR8, and PR7. These sites were not related but all acheived high rankings and ended up with lots of traffic. Let's say this personn created a fourth site. Would Google look at domain registration information and say "hey, this guy has created three previous sites that all became very important" and then elevate this new fourth site in some favorered way?
On the other side of the tracks let's say another guy had previously registered 50 domains, some of which were banned by Google, some of which were very spammy, and all of which never gained high homepage PR, and were all judged by Google as lacking in merit, in whatever why Google may record such data.
Let's say this guy who created so many bad sites in the past now creates a new site. Would Google look at past domain registration history and then rate the new site as "not worthy"?
An analogy for this might be "safe driver" and "habitual offender". Some States allow a driver 12 or 15 points against their drivers licenses over a period of one to three years and if you exceed those number of penalty points your license is revoked for your being a habitual offender. Some vehicle insurance companies offer safe driver discounts for drivers that never get in accidents or get moving violation points against them.
Another analogy might be two men, each with four children. The first mans' first three children grow up to be an attorney, a physician, and an astronaut. The second man's first three children grow up to be a murderer, a rapist, and drug dealer. Would it be reasonable for Google to conclude it would be unlikely that the first man's fourth child would grow up to be a derelict and that the second man's child would grow up to be a responsible and productive member of society?
Might it be that Google could be using domain registration information in a similar manner, boosting new sites from domain owners with proven past quality records and demoting new sites who's domain owners have proven wreckless in the past?
The reason I ask is I have a client who for valid business reasons wants to split his business into multiple websites and drop work on the current ones. He's on the verge of having some effective and well ranking sites and he just wants to stop working on them and start off on some others. I'm just wondering if doing so might establish for him a bad track record that could impair future performance of his new sites.
If Brett started a new site, would Google say "hey this is the guy that did WebmasterWorld, this new site must be important"?