Google Authorship is set to be the next big thing in Google determining how important you and your blog are, it’s a good idea to get to work on it soon as it’s not a simple process, and Google is under no obligation to implement it evn if you get everything set up correctly.

It just goes further to justify my conspiracy theory on Google penalizing the little people to get more revenue from adwords – if you cant get traffic from search engines, the next step is PPC advertising!

The domains I purchased were bought at Godaddy auctions. They were domains that were not renewed by their previous owners when the time came up for their renewal.

I did not get any of the content that was on the site. In fact, by the time I was aware of the sites, the content was already gone. The only thing I saw was a page that Godaddy had thrown up there as a temporary homepage for the site.

It is not uncommon for the PageRank on those sites to zero out right after you buy them. But, the next time a PageRank update occurs with Google, those people will probably see their PageRank return. It might not return to be as high as it was. Instead it might be a point lower.

It really depends on the domain in question though. If the reason that domain had a PR5 was because it had one good link from a PR7 page and that PR7 link gets removed, then obviously that site is going to lose all its visible PageRank.

If your primary purpose is to buy domains with PageRank that will stick, then you have to do some backlink analysis before you purchase the domain. You should check to see where the PR is coming from so that you get some sense of whether or not it is likely to stick. If your PR is coming from ten different higher PR links from ten different domains, then your PR is more likely to stick than it would be if it was coming from just one place. But then again it depends on the places that are linking to you and what kind of sites they are and whether they are actively monitored for such things.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article and comment on it. Yes, the impression that you have regarding my feeling that it might be bad to buy an aged domain with pre-existing PageRank to use for a blog is correct. I am glad that you have had positive experiences with doing that. I am wondering if the domains that you purchased were expired and you bought them from a reseller of expired domains, or did you buy the domain from the person who owned it before the domain expired so that the ownership was simply a transfer of ownership? Were the original articles from the original domain kept in an archive, or deleted? I don’t know if it makes any difference or not – I am certainly no expert on anything. Just gathering data to try to understand the patterns at play, if you know what I mean. I am definitely learning more every day about the Internet, blogging and SEO, and your comment has brought something to my attention that I had no idea existed! You said you used the “Wayback Machine” and I had never heard of it! So NOW I have to get more information about that! The saying “the more I learn the more I realize how dumb I am, and how much more there IS to learn” is certainly true!

I am acquainted with some people that are new (as in newer than me) to the blogging experience and recently I have been getting personal private messages from them about how they had bought two expired domains twelve days ago. One was a PR 5 and the other was a PR 4. Two days ago my acquaintance messaged me that the page rank of BOTH of those domains changed overnight and were now Page Rank 0. I did not go into deep details of the situation, but I did encourage that person to stop spending hundreds of dollars on expired domains with high page rank and to focus on getting new domains and build his own page rank from the beginning.

One of my rationalities behind this is that part of the existing page rank of that expired domain is based on links that went to the domain when it was owned by someone else. Once that domain expires, it is conceivable that the links that went to that domain might be withdrawn, for various reasons. And once the repeat visitors to the site come back to the site and realize that the site has changed, they may be inclined to not continue to visit the site, for one reason or another. And perhaps the new owner of the site changes the coding of the site, and the code has errors in it, no new sitemap, no meta tags or descriptions.

I do think that you make an excellent point, and I thank you for your input!