Considering Buying a Top Yahoo Ranked Site

But it's Spammy Backlinks Makes me Pause to Consider... Should I do it?

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Hi

For some reason I never rank on Yahoo. I am about to purchase a site that is ranked in my market on a big keyword and is ranked #1. In looking at the site there are like 14,000 spammy links form blogs. The seller is claiming that this is o.k. and that the #1 site for the last year had the same types of links.
I wonder if it just peaked and he is selling it and then I will be left with a big loss? Anyone have any experience with quick jumps in rankings on Yahoo with lots of links?

[keep it loose]

From what I understand when a domain changes ownership (the whois and ICANN registrant information is changed), the domain's history is wiped clean and the new owner is left with a website/domain that is perceived to be brand new. For the sake of the guy above me, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Obviously, if there existed an already strong link base, which is debatable in this instance, it would be considerably easier to get the site's rankings back up, but I doubt you would see top rankings within the first several months.

Who uses Yahoo! anyway? ;)

[martinibuster]

That's never happened to me. Sounds like you may be confusing this with the way Google treats expired domains.

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Thanks

It looks like they have 1000's of blog links.
But I noticed everyone one ranked on Yahoo has blog links.
I wonder how risky this is? I guess I would monitor rankings on this keyword for a while.