Thanks for that info. I have never seen pool.com before.

Yeah, buying over sites isn’t the strategy it used to be. Google does have checks in place to determine if content has been altered. But it does seem to work pretty well if you can alter the content in a manner that doesn’t stand out too well i.e. keep structure, internal link (anchor text) etc and just gradually alter the content.

Look forward to speaking more.

If you signed up to services like pool.com you’ll see that there’s plenty of competition and most domains with value go into auction. Different strategies to get such domains:
- scrape directory websites (even DMOZ has websites listed that are down) and ping them yourself
- contact pr5 website owners that didn’t update since ’97

The difficult part would be to put a number on the value of the domain since it can lose it’s rankings pretty quick. There are enough ways to get a domain to pr5 or even 6 and still you get no decent rankings.

I’ve purchased a couple of domains in my time and some of them did have a past. Although there backlinks didnt carry through on google webmasters, I do believe it carried some weight and made it easier to rerank the site. I can’t offer any real pointers but in my experience it was much easier to rank, maybe it was the avoidance of the sandbox.