I have heard that when domain ownership changes, the domain loses its page rank. My theory on this is:  Lots of sites selling high PR domains actually cheat. They invest in high PR links for the domain they want to sell (say buy a yahoo directory link, or maybe even use their own set of high PR pages to link to that domain temporarily). As soon as someone buys the high PR domain, they delete those links. And the new owner effectively gets a '0 page rank' site. This might have led to the misconception that changing owners makes the domain lose its PR. But I may be wrong.Can someone share their insights on this? Do you think it is safe for me to change registrar without affecting my SEO and current page rank at all? (Note that changing registrars can be as good as changing owners if privacy protection is enabled - as complete whois info will change). Anyone with prior experience where changing registrars has or has not affected their SEO?regards,JP
Does changing domain ownership affect SEO?
seo;pagerank;domain registrar;whois;ownership
Google's Information retrieval based on historical data patent is about as close to authoritative (i.e. not anecdotal) data as you can get:[0101] Also, or alternatively, the  age, or other information, regarding a  name server associated with a domain  may be used to predict the legitimacy  of the domain. A good name server  may have a mix of different domains  from different registrars and have a  history of hosting those domains,  while a bad name server might host  mainly pornography or doorway domains,  domains with commercial words (a  common indicator of spam), or  primarily bulk domains from a single  registrar, or might be brand new. The  newness of a name server might not  automatically be a negative factor in  determining the legitimacy of the  associated domain, but in combination  with other factors, such as ones  described herein, it could be.This would suggest that the domain's registration data and nameservers do factor in, however, anecdotally, (nameserver changes, registrant info changes, registrar changes) I would say that changing registrars has very little long-term impact on a domain's ranking.