John Andrews was live blogging every word Matt Cutts said at the recent Domain Roundtable and one of the comments Matt made stuck out quite a lot for me.
We have long been aware that buying and selling sites was a tricky business and as a consultant I spend a considerable amount of time explaining the best practice methods for buying and selling sites to make sure they don’t lose trust. We haven’t ever seen a site lose trust but the fact that Google sometimes resets the trust and sometimes doesn’t makes for very uncertain ground.
Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero.
Of course sometimes a site should have it’s trust reset when it changes hands but shouldn’t their be some guidelines about this? If I sell my business then should the new owner have to bear the risk of having the sites rankings reset?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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It’s an interesting issue and I don’t think that trust should automatically be reset just because there is a new owner.
Would definitely be interested in a future blog post from you about best practice in this area
I don’t agree. It’s something that you’ve build over years and I don’t think Google will be thanked for this.
Wouldn’t the easiest solution be to have a corporation own the website in the first place? When you sell the corp, the owner of the corp changes, but not the domain owner.
It costs less than $100 to form a corporation in most states and the forms are typically available online.
Funny, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune and other Tribune properties were all sold to Sam Zell recently. Think they got reset? Ha!
when selling an asset the asset shouldn’t change. This is essentially what google is doing.
That may be what he said, but it’s just not true. I have purchased very prominent sites 5 years ago, 5 weeks ago, and everywhere in between, and none of them have ever had their trust reset. I’ve also never been very careful about making changes slowly or not changing the site completely. In one extreme case several years ago, in fact, literally the only URL we kept intact was the homepage. All other URLs were 301′d or disappeared altogether.
I’m interested to hear more about that comment, whether it was indeed what he said, and what exactly he meant by it.
Changing hands could be defined as expiring and someone catching/registering it afresh in this example and not really apply to a sale or transfer I would expect.
um, “live blogging every word”? Really? I posted some notes of the session… with a few quotes… not nearly “every word” and certainly not intended to be a transcription of the session. I clipped 80% of my own notes so as to limit the post to just what I thought needed more discussion.
Great to see discussion.. but maybe change that entre’?
Comment on: Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero
Just purchased domain name with PR7 let’s call that domain example.com.
example.com was registered in 2006 with 128 Google Backlinks and solid PR7, all great links. In 2008 or better said a week ago, example.com was on GoDaddy’s Aftermarket with the starting bid of $10, at the time there was only one bidder, so I placed a bid. To cut the story short, I own that domain name now and PR still hold same solid PR7, NOTHING was reset at all, the ownership of example.com not only changed names but Countries as well.
When I checked whois I realized that this example.com did not even change the original date/year of registration!
This applies (I guess) only of the domain name was actually deleted, not if the domain change hands, so I am living proof that (Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero) is NOT TRUE!
Thanks
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PR wouldn’t change until the next update whatever happened. Are your search rankings still the same?
More comments from Patrick AltoftHi Patrick,
Nothing changed at all and also, the website on that specific domain was gone for awhile, so when I got the domain it was GoDaddy’s Parking Page.
Right now my site is online, 100% everything different:
Name
Address
City
Country
Name Servers
Design
Verified with Google Webmaster, Analytics etc…
Still solid PR7.
Comment on: Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero
Sorry, I just can’t get this at all.
If this is true, does that mean when Google purchased YouTube their score was reset to zero?
I need somebody to explain this to me, as I really don’t get it?
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I think they are just reserving the right to reset the trust but they don’t always do it. This makes it a risk buying a new site.
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Yes but how much traffic does Google send…….
More comments from Patrick AltoftAll right I got that domain with PR7 and in last week I was working on some quality backlinks and now my new domain is PR8, so the myth is busted, which makes it untrue.
Also I wanted to see how Google trust my example.com so under the Blogroll (since I am using wordpress) I placed 4 clients links just to see what’s going to happend. So far one of them was indexed by google and on my client domain PR jumped from PR0 to PR3.
It’s a risk that I was willing to take, but now I see that it works, no matter if you leave your front page unchanged, or that you do the updates slowly or like me 100% total change of everything.
So it does work.
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