Purchasing A Domain Without Changing The Registrar Info? Options

[BJ Wright]

Recently I was working on a young site with a partner, the domain was registered with his godaddy account. We split ways and I continued with the site, and made the big mistake of transfering the domain to my godaddy account. We had achieved most of the rankings that we were looking for, and had some #1 positions for our main phrase.

Within a few days everything was dropped. The site is still indexed within Google, but I havent had traffic since that day. I have submitted the site for re-inclusion, trying to explain what happened. I am crossing my fingers to see what the future for this website is? Is there a better way to get that site back?

My 2nd question is: I am looking at purchasing a old domain. How do you purchase a site without changing over the registrar information, or any of the key parts that will effect the current standings of the site?

[JohnMu]

Changing domain registration details will generally have no influence on your site's indexing and ranking on Google. I've moved domains across accounts and registrars and have seen no change at all (at least none that I could pin-point on the domain whois information ).

It sounds to me more like something was problematic with your site beforehand and Google just happened to react to it at the same time as your domain changes.

When you buy a site the only way to prevent changes in the whois information is to make sure that it is behind a privacy service (eg domainsbyproxy) before it is bought and to keep it with the same privacy service afterwards (but in your account). A situation like that is fairly rare, however. If the previous owner has to move it into a privacy service before selling it to you, that will already be noticed. I wouldn't sweat it - whois information can change regularly, it's not a signal of a completely new website.

Post your URL, if you want more ideas

John

[BJ Wright]

Thanks John! Here is the url of the site I am looking at purchasing http://www.best-home-security.com/. The site isn't that great, but it is an older site and has some traffic.

I have read a lot of discussions about buying old domains and making sure not to change the registrar information. Especially with Google being a registrar wouldn't they be watching this closer, and having it effect the rankings of the site? What is your opinion on buying old domains as a strategy?

Thanks,

BJ

[bragadocchio]

I have read a lot of discussions about buying old domains and making sure not to change the registrar information. Especially with Google being a registrar wouldn't they be watching this closer, and having it effect the rankings of the site?

By itself, as a signal, it might raise a flag to the search engines, but there are many legitimate reasons to change the registrar information:

Change in webmaster responsible for the site, purchase of the company behind the site or merger, sale of site.

These things may or may not indicate a change in the purpose of the site associated with the domain name.

[JohnMu]

You do not even have to be a registrar to look at the domain whois history - DomainTools has a direct interface to that data and I'm sure there are even automated ways (for those who want to pay for that information), eg: history of google.com.

I believe the registrar status of Google is being over-rated by many SEO people. Anyone can be a registrar, provided they can prove that they have the infrastructure and that they pay the down-payment (I believe it's $10'000, but I'm not certain). To a company like Google, that's peanuts.

Their registrar status is also just for certain top-level-domains, at the moment for .com, .biz, .net, .org, .info, .name and .pro. As a registrar they will likely automatically get informed of any changes in whois and nameservers for those top level domains. However, that would still leave so many TLDs without analysis. Would they really implement an algorithm to analyze domain changes just for a fraction (albeit a large one, at the moment) of the web?

Considering that they can recognize general changes in the structure of a website through crawling, would the additional information from those TLDs even make a difference? Or are they just using that data to test new ideas with and wish to keep the individual queries private (if you are not a registrar, you would have to query whois servers of some other registrar -- I am fairly certain that no other registrar would like Google's amount of queries on their servers).

All in all, I wouldn't worry about it. If you like the name and if you think it is worth it to you, then go out and buy it.

Just out of curiosity, what would you pay for that site? As far as I can tell, it's "just" a made-for-adsense site; can you be certain that it remains indexed with the next change of The Algorithm? Are you sure you couldn't put something better together? There are a few sites where you can buy older domain names (sometimes with sites), sedo.com is one that is often used - you might want to take a look there and see if you can't find something a notch or two better (unless the price is really good) . Usually domain names without dashes in them are worth more.

Good luck!

John

This post has been edited by softplus: May 2 2007, 01:26 AM

[rmccarley]

Softplus I have definately seen ranking drops where the only change was registration info. While I agree the effect is generaly overrated by SEOs (and over-speculated) it is there.

What I have *heard* is that the link-age starts over so any value from aged links just isn't there. Without that the link structure is revaluated which can disrupt the SERPs.

That hypothesis makes sense to me based on what I've seen but I can't verify it.

[JohnMu]

What kind of information did you change? I've had a few sites where I moved to a different registrar and (accidentally) popped in and out of privacy services and so far have not seen any reaction from Google from that (maybe I was lucky or maybe I just didn't notice it).

I assume that Google wants to recognize when a site is no longer the site it used to be, in order to be able to discount the links pointing to the "old site" (with the same domain name). Assuming the content remains the same, should it really be seen as a new site when whois information is changed? That seems strange to me.

What did you observe after changing the domain information? Did you transfer it to/from someone else? Was the domain online the whole time? Did it look like Google re-indexed the site as something new?

John

[BJ Wright]

Thanks for all the great information!

Just out of curiosity, what would you pay for that site? As far as I can tell, it's "just" a made-for-adsense site; can you be certain that it remains indexed with the next change of The Algorithm? Are you sure you couldn't put something better together?

The price is very small, my plans for the site would not be for the adsense. I am interested in purchasing the site because of the age of the site. As I am tired of starting brand new sites and trying to rank them. I can turn a profit on the site, almost immediately. I do not plan on changing the layout/structure of the site for some time. But eventually would like to get away from adsense and do some type of lead generation.

You have raised a concern, will changing much of the information over time for the site hurt the rankings?

This post has been edited by BJ Wright: May 2 2007, 05:18 PM