Domain age factor in Google after a resale

[gniver]

I recently purchased a domain on the resale market and intend to use it in place of my current business domain. It has been through 2 other owners and has had sites up since 2000. Does the age of a domain transfer if the whois changes?

[tedster]

The answer is "sometimes". Google reserves the right to set everything to zero when a domain changes ownership, and sometimes they do - but sometimes they don't.

If a company gets sold, and the whois changes along with the sale, the age (PR, trust and backlinks, too) will often stay the same as long as the site isn't radically changed within a short time. When the site changes in the same relative timeframe as the sale, that's when everything is more likely to be set back to zero.

[joost]

Google employees read newspapers, so they know about multinationals beïng sold. But it's hard to imagine Google knows about every company changing hands. So how do they keep track? It would be too much work keeping track by hand anyway. So have they automated this process?

Does Google -for example- keep records of sites that are for sale (for instance recognizable because of a Sedo visitor counter) so they can automatically penalize when the domain changes hands?