I’ve been buying up expired domains with existing PR for over two years now, and up until recently it’s been great. Lately, however, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend.

It seems that when a domain name expires, Google now does a very good job of “cleaning its cache” of that domain. This is nothing new - when a domain expired Google had been clearing out the results for awhile. What IS new, however, it is appears that Google is now clearing out existing backlinks, and those backlinks will no longer count for future PR at Google… ever.

Earlier this year, when I would buy an expired domain name, Google would show 0 backlinks right after I bought it, but the pre-existing backlinks would come back into Google within a month or so. Now, I’ve got a bunch of expired domains I bought over the summer, and the pre-existing backlinks are still not showing up in Google. For some of these domains it’s been 4 months now.

The links still exist, as Yahoo and MSN are still showing them… but for some reason, Google still has not picked them back up. It may be that Google is now forever ignoring pre-existing backlinks after a domain expires.

Just something to think about if you’re buying expired domains for a quick boost in Google…