Hey Guys,
I'm posting this as a case study at my site, but thought since its been a hotbed of conversation here...that I'd post some initial results.
Being that SEGuru.Net was a relatively newly registered domain, I was searching my expired lists for domains that would be relevant to webmasters.
In my Google list of expired domains, I found this domain:
FREE-WEBMASTER-RESOURCES.COM
You can WHOIS this to see when I acquired it. I picked it up at the beginning of May.
Now here's the wierd thing...all I did was put a redirect on it to SEGuru.Net. I used a server redirect at that.
Googlebot was all over it.
Now, please note...when I bought the domain...I concerned myself only with the fact that the expired domain was still listed/indexed at Google and that Google still had indexed backlinks for the domain.
THERE WAS NO PAGERANK FOR THE DOMAIN AT ALL WHEN I ACQUIRED IT.
Now, you can see where we are on the calender...here's how Google has treated it thus far:
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...xpired+domains
That is page 1 of the results for the term expired domains. I noticed some light traffic from FREE-WEBMASTER-RESOURCES.COM, and turns out...Google crawled the server redirect with no issues.
Not only did it crawl it, but it attributed the redirect URL's primary keywords to the expired domains new content value and placed it on page 4 out of the gate with no tweaking.
Now, why am I sharing this? To prove that placement can be short-cut, and imagine if this had been done with a domain that had existing PR?
I'll ask Marc P that question with his PR7! lol Ya bitch!