Are rankings affected when a site is sold?

[billybw]

When a website is sold and registered to a new owner, does it affect the rankings of the site's pages in the Google search results, assuming that the new owner doesn't change any of the content on the site?

Thank you

[mjtaylor]

In my experience, no, though I have read otherwise, but I have presided over many a change in registrant with no ill effect. Often when a site's registration is changed, so is the hosting, and often structure and content is changed, all at the same time, and conventional SEO wisdom says too much change at once can affect rankings badly - but *not* necessarily. If the changes are generally positive - great new content, and an easier to navigate, SEO-friendlier structure, the rankings are likely to improve enormously. I have done the SEO for several redesigns and launches of sites in the past year where content and structure changed much, as well as hosting and all showed marked improvement less than a month from launch .. some within days ... hope that helps ... I am sure others will ring in on Monday.

Cheers, MJ

[andyf]

IMO just changing ownership of a site should not affect ranking of site until new owner have a host server at same location(geographical location) and if the contents and backlinks are not changed rigorously; then everything should work fine

[incrediblehelp]

What I see when domains change hands is the internal PR reset. For instance look at the recently purchased domain www seo com:

SEO Search Engine Optimization and Search Marketing | SEO.COM

The domains was banned a few years ago by Google. Now since it was sold it was reindexed. For a short period after the domain changed hands it ever ranked high in the SERPs for the query "SEO". This was because of Google's boost to new pages and websites that commonly happen to everyone. Now it is not ranking as high because of the low of amount of backlinks. Of course when Google updates itself it should rank fine again because of all the blogs threads that linked to it when it was sold a few weeks back.

[billybw]

Quote:
What I see when domains change hands is the internal PR reset.

Do you mean that the PR of the home page stays the same, but the PR of the other pages drops to PR0?

Thank you

[incrediblehelp]

All of the pages.