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Hello Rand,

I could say that you are the ultimate Guru when it comes to manipulating the search engines but we all have our views right? Would love to see a post from you on the subject.

You are teaching people what works and what doesn't. You have the entire web to play with so you are revealing publicly what is working and what is not through your correlation data, is this not teaching people how to manipulate the search engines? How about your moz tools and OSE, are they not to help people manipulate the search engines?

black, grey, blue, yellow we all do what works right? I am learning and testing my methods. Want to label me as a black hat? that hurts especially when I am more legitimate than the majority of people practicing SEO

Does everyone here do "white hat SEO" if so then all people need to know is:

CREATE GREAT CONTENT THAT ATTRACTS NATURAL LINKS

I completely understand my mistakes by posting here, I have gone over the boundaries of what people see as ethical SEO and for that I appologise to you and anyone else reading this, it will not happen again.

Rand, I hope in future you can dedicate more time on producing better quality WBF's. I like to feel excited that a new WBF has just come out, lately I couldn't care less.

Have a great day and thank you for having such a great site.

Ryan, again you are going off of topic. White Hat / Black Hat this is one of seomoz's categories in Q&A.

I do not post on other forums, especially black hat SEO forums as it seems a lot of people are extremely confused about SEO. This is not a question of who knows better than who or what is white/black hat.

If you would like to create a discussion on  another thread I would be happy to participate.

I am grateful for your views and assumptions on this discussion.

Have a great day

Thank you, and now you know how it feels.

I'm not angry that the PR dropped, I knew what risks were involved and strangely enough I have previously purchased domains that lost toolbar PR but came back a few days later and that is without a PR update.

I am now at a stage where I am being asked for sites in bulk that have PR5 - PR6 PR. Previously I would buy PR4 domains which have always been easily obtainable for under $100.

Now I am being asked to supply 10 X PR5+ sites that are hosted in the UK and that is when things become serious, I don't want to pay $500 - $2000 on a domain knowing that it's worthless in terms of ranking other sites? even if that is what my client want's, i'm not here to scam anyone.

My process is to acquire domains that have been abandoned by the original owner and for me to come in and buy his domain along with the links that point to that domain and create high quality paid directories out of them, are directory links worthless? my main client does not seem to think so and nor do several respected and unnameable members of SEOmoz.

I want to expand my business to the best i can possibly be, but I can't go and spend $2000 on a domain for it to only lose it's pagerank and value. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen and I don't know why.

Ryan, I can't just have someone tell me that what I am doing does not work. I need proof. If what you say is true then why did toolbar PR flow to my inner pages of my directories on the last update a few days ago? Pagerank is a level of importance given by Google themselves right? I have not built any additional links to the sites.

Maybe I just have to deal with the occasional domains losing value. There is something that is a little strange, when I search for the domain in OSE it reveals that the domain was blocked by robots.txt, I wonder if that is the cause to the domain losing PR? and maybe it will come back when it i cached next.

I don't understand anything you are saying.

What has the fact that I practice black hat SEO got to do with anything?

I have been practicing SEO for 14 years and some young guy comes here to tell me that I am manipulating the search engines, honestly buddy I came here for some advice from the experts yet it seems I am only getting answers from rude people that make assumptions. Where is your proof?

It seems to me that you have never practiced black hat SEO so how can you feel confident in answering my questions?

Unless you can be polite, keep this thread on topic, and provide actual proof to whatever you are trying to say, I would like to request that you no longer give me advise.

Today Google re-indexed the site and provided accurate information from the info: command

Google has yet to reveal that any trust is being passed to the domain as it is not being found by it's main keywords, I will wait and see what happens once it gets re-cached. This is disappointing especially when I can provide other expired domains that still rank competitively.

Ryan,

What if I did the following:
my registed company moved location
I changed my name
I decided to stop investing in traffic
Decided to change domain name and 301 redirect it to a new one
Accidently forgot to renew the domain until it was near enough deleted

These are just a few what if's that Google must think about before deciding to devalue pagerank of a domain.

I currently have pagerank domains that produce 20,000 indexed pages without me having to build any links. That is clear proof to me that google does not pay attention to this.

As i'm sure you are aware there was a pagerank update a few days ago, some of my sites did lose some pagerank the majority remained the same and one even went up to a PR5 from a PR4.

I have just recieved your email thank you, I will reply in the morning as i's 2am now and I am about to fall asleep.

Hello James and Ryan,

I currently have 100+ domains that i have purchased from namejet 40 of which are PR4+

Each of those domains did not lose toolbar PR when I purchased them, they did not become de-indexed from Google, actual pagerank still existed, and the majority have kept the same PR after the recent update.

Both of you have stated that Google is responsible for my domain losing PR and becoming de-indexed, sorry but I don't get it because it does not make sense, why are my other domains still good?

I honestly could only think it was due to network solutions but now i am just baffled.

Maybe someone could take a look at it for me please? my email is info@umtmedia.com

A few days ago I had asked a question regarding purchasing an expiring domain to redirect to a new related site. The post can be found here >>> http://www.seomoz.org/q/purchasing-an-expiring-domain-with-quality-related-links

The domain has some great links with several being from PR5 pages on nih.gov aswell as several keyword rich domains. This made my day and I ended up paying $309 for it.

So today I have the domain with the registrar network solutions who I believe are owned by Google, not sure if that is the truth or not as I can't find any info on that. now my domain is no longer indexed in Google and the toolbar's pagerank has dropped from a 4 to a 0. It was not my choice to use network solutions but namejet only use them or ENOM.

I have now installed a wordpress site on the domain to see if any pagerank exist, if it does then the site will shortly be indexed in Google without me building any links to it.

Just 2 days ago the site was in Google, had the correct info:domainname.com command and now the info: command shows nothing. the site is either banned or all of the actual pagerank has been removed by Google.

I am a little bit dissapointed in this even though it was initially an experiment to see if I could purchase good links through expiring domains.

The thing is I am seeing people purchase domains with good links in excess of $3000.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

I'm about to purchase a domain that has highly trusted links pointed to it. I would like to 301 redirect that domain to point to a brand new domain in the same niche.

Some of the links that the expiring domain would take me a long time to obtain so I am thinking to use this method to my advantage.

I know that this is not really a legitimate way to go to build backlinks, but surely this is going to give me good serp improvement which is my main concern at the moment.

I am going to test this method to see if it benefits me in anyway but I would like some opinions to this please.

Hello,

As an experiment I am trying to work with an SBI site but am noticing index.html is being forced on me as the homepage.

As I understand it's good practice to 301 redirect the index.html page to the to the actual home page. Can someone please confirm that I am right in thinking this?

Here is an example:

http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/index.html
http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/

According to yahoo 773 links are pointing to the index.html page and 771 links are pointing to the / page.

I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate but surely the index.html page should be redirected right? am I going mad here?

Now if we look at this site:

http://www.jugglenow.com the homepage has 198 links according to yahoo
http://www.jugglenow.com/index.html this page also has 198 links? now I am confused, are these 2 the same page?

On this page:

http://www.jugglenow.com/juggling-balls.html notice how there is no link to the actual homepage but there is a link to the index.html page.

Am I missing something here because I can't figure it out, surely there should be just 1 homepage without a index.html page.

Any help would be appreciated