What happens to rankings of a website after it is sold – A case study
What happens to rankings of a website after it is sold, is one of the open seo questions. Matt Cutts is believed to have said in domain round table 2008 that is a domain changes hand, then google resets the link value to zero/ near zero. If that were true then the entire business model of site flipping would be dead by now. Hence I have a strong suspicion that rankings of a domain remains unaffected by its sale.
Good seos are expected to confirm their views through experiments 
So I am going to set up a simple experiment to find out what happens to a site after it gets sold. Recently one of my favorite blogs, bloggingtips.com got sold on flippa for USD 60,000. That may explain my interest in Binaryday, even though I do not have any adsense after splitting with my partner. The important thing is the analytics report was posted on the site. I have created a list of top keywords and where on google bloggingtips is ranking for them.
- Blogging tips – 1
- Blogger Themes – 8
- Blogger Theme – 4
- Great Blogs -2
- Blogger widgets – 13
I shall be again checking these rankings one month from now and we shall know if domains have a life after sale
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Not sure if Google really resets the linkbacks/ranking when the domain changes hands.
As for the bloggingtips.com, I am surprised that a blog of that size attracted $60,000! Perhaps they bought it primarily for the domain name
already know about this thing from you. yes humor but very informative.
I don’t think it become zero.I have seen many sites sale without any affect.