Trustrank, expiration and whois

How does expiration affects trustrank -if at all?

[obono]

I recently lost a large amount of traffic. Given the dates this happened, it looked unrelated to any of the recent data refreshes.

Analyzing my records, I realized my oldest domain had expired on the exact date of the traffic loss. Mistakenly, I had written down a future expiration date and when the real one came about the domain was let go. A week into expiration I contacted the registrar, paid for another 5 years and the situation was restored. As a matter of fact, no real changes to whois ever happened, except for the brief lapsus into 'expiration territory'.

Traffic never recovered.

Although it may be impossible to know what really happened I am thinking that the short dip into expiration impacted its trustrank and in turn, affected the trust of the domains at which the "old one" was pointing to. In fact, the real traffic loss happened on this secondary domains... not in the expired one.

I'd like to know more about this subject if anyone has had a similar experience and perhaps how to remedy it. The 'expiration' problem happened as a result of a human mistake and now seems to have affected a group of pages that were the repository of this 'trust'.

Provided there is any truth in the speculation that trust may be gone from expired domains, what would be a good way to approach google and find out first, if the above holds any ground and second, would they consider particular scenarios such as human errors?

[jetteroheller]

All domains, I had let expire, are pruchase from other companies placing ads on it and doing strange tricks to remain in the index.

I even think, that some of them show the complete old contence to GoogleBot, while the visitors sees only ads.

Maybe this is the reason for Your problem.

I would try to contact Google about this.

[obono]

I was able to renew my domain after it 'technically' expired so both content and owner remained the same. As well as all technical aspects (ip, host, etc). So for practical purposes it didn't expired.

But from what you said I can understand why google may give 'expired' domains a special treatment. If so, I may have gotten caught on the wrong side and penalized for just having made a silly mistake, as opposed to a manipulation scheme.