Bigwebmaster - 2:28 pm on May 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

Could be paranoia. For some reason I remember that I heard Google could be watching the whois records to de-value domains sold to other parties as Google might not want to "trust" them then. Could make sense to me why Google would use such a practice if they do.

Normally if anything gets affected traffic gets affected first, then the change in the pagerank would show months later when the toolbar snapshot gets goes through.

However, I am wondering if this type of penalty (if it exists) would immediately knock down the PR and shortly there after indexing behavior and the results that show in in Google might be affected.

Up until today Googlebot has been visiting 5000-15000 per day. It might be too early at this point but so far googlebot has visited 129 times today which is way below normal :(

I do find it hard to believe Google would penalize a website soley based on a name change. I am sure there are numerous websites that have name changes with the whois records even though the same entity owns it. Everything going on is probably just a coincidence and something else is to blame. However, just to make sure though I started this thread to see if anybody else has noticed anything changing if they updated their whois records.