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i am an experienced web developer and am interested in purchasing a particular authority website. it ranks very well in google and yahoo for the related primary keywords, excellent domain name, and PR6. the content is very stale, however, and the current owner is not monetizing the site. it has good IBLs, and only a few of the links are from other sites that she owns.
if i was to purchase the domain, i intend to change the DNS info to direct visitors to my current server; i also plan on updating the site design, navigation and content. what will happen when google notices that the site has been changed and that there is new whois info?
will the massive changes have any effect on the ranking and/or PR? although i intend to rewrite the site, i will follow all the white-hat SEO rules regarding keyword density, title etc. is there any benefit to making changes slowly?
I just did the exact same thing and have similar questions. I would not make drastic changes. Also, there is knowledge that changes in DNS and whois info can penalize a site.
You can PM me if you want to talk about this more.
I am going through this right now trying to decide what to do.
That would make it appear that the site's original owner just moved to a different hosting service.
Maybe after one or two google updates, you could verify that the PR had stayed stable, and then begin to do substantive work on the site.
Also, there is knowledge that changes in DNS and whois info can penalize a site.
Hmm... is that your personal experience? I know someone who purchased a website and she changed the dns and whois, fixed the site, added content, and does well with it.
This happened to a friend of mine whose domain once held his resumes and pictures of his son's bar mitzvah. He decided to let it go, but I had links to his resume, and a while later I got this really apologetic email from him asking to update his link to his new domain, because then his name on one of my pages brought up pr0n.
If Google thinks this is what happened to a site when it changed DNS and whois, then I'm certain the PR and SERPs will plummet.
I'm pretty sure that if you keep all the original content at the same URLs as it was to start with, but then make incremental changes, your referrals won't suffer. There are many reasons to move to a different server, most of them legitimate, and I'm pretty sure Google understands them.
I read a recent patent by google that verifies this.
I can affirm that it is not happening based on experience.
Additionally, that would play havoc on site owners who change the whois info when they move to another office AND switch to a different server.
As far as taking over a site and using it for pron, that's pretty unimaginative. The better way to do it is build out the website but within the theme of the pron site but keeping within the theme of the current site. It sounds harder to do than it really is.
Once you build out pages, you have all that content to play with. You then point links to your pron pages and the people who are linking to it will never realize it.
Makes sense to have the mother site with many pr 3's pointing to it than a whole bunch of pr 3's treading water and not converting...
I can affirm that it is not happening based on experience.
What I meant to say is that I think google can tell the difference between someone moving to a new hosting service or selling their domain, and the domain being captured by a pr0n site operator or someone else who doesn't deserve the pagerank.
How many employees does google have now? People are always complaining google isn't as relevant as it used to be. Well, the reason it is as relevant as it still is, is that they must have hundreds of staff devoted to defeating search engine gaming strategies.
A friend of a friend is a PhD linguist who works for google. She is one of many. One of google's stated long-term goals is to use artificial intelligence to actually understand the content of pages, to be able to tell the difference between well-written prose and scraper sites consisting of a bunch of unrelated paragraphs.
Try this, I did recently: do a search, in quotes, for a full sentence towards the beginning of one of your most popular content pages. Changes are pretty good that you'll find someone had stolen a paragraph or two out of your page.
When I tried this, I went and looked, and found a very respectably appearing page with a short essay that claimed to be written by some guy with a phd. Gave a link to his homepage and everything. I found two paragraphs out of one of my articles, then several other paragraphs that also appeared to be lifted from other pages on the same topic. The page as a whole made no sense whatsoever.
But it probably looked great to google! and it had adsense on it!
Google's never going to have enough money to hire enough people to stay ahead of the scammers by brute force alone. That's why google advertises jobs by running incredibly difficult math brainteasers on the billboards next to highway 101 on the san francisco bay peninsula.
Google job interviews are legendarily difficult. That's because they only way they're going to beat the scrapers and black hat seos is to have a staff consisting of one hundred per cent rocket scientists.
If Google thinks this is what happened to a site when it changed DNS and whois, then I'm certain the PR and SERPs will plummet.
What I meant to say is that I think google can tell the difference between someone moving to a new hosting service or selling their domain, and the domain being captured by a pr0n site operator or someone else who doesn't deserve the pagerank.
I understand what you are trying to say, but with all respect to what you assume, I am telling you what I know. It is not an assumption. It is knowledge acquired from experience.
Google won't penalize it. There are many transactions every day where a website passes hands and the content continues to grow. Where is the harm to the user?
There are many transactions every day where people buy sites for their links and point them to their money sites and they prosper. I can't get any more explicit unless I start dropping URLs.
robotsdobetter makes a good point of being cautious if you're concerned about an important site. It's good to be cautious, especially if it helps you sleep better.
