joost - 12:26 pm on May 20, 2010 (gmt 0)

A few years ago I developed the strategy of buying dropped domains with good backlinks and pagerank, and either 301-ed them to one of my main sites, or host them with a bit of content, and link them to my sites. Now, years later, some of those still bring in nice traffic and PR.

After Google stopped counting the page rank I stopped doing this. Since they now looked at who owned a domain before and after it was dropped, I figured Google might punish my ranking for this because this is not the intention of a 301.

Recently I found a nice typo domain for a competitors' generic keyword domain (2 generic words in one domain; one spelled wrong) and could not resist. And it's bringing in nice traffic. But I fear for retribution from Google.

My question: Is anyone still using this strategy (for the traffic)? I assume PR indeed does not pass through anymore, as was announced? Any thoughts on retribution from Google?