[astrange]

> Also if you're simply buying the blog to point some links to another site for garnering Google linkjuice

That sounds like paying for a link to me. Does it count as paid links to them? I always wondered about this kind of thing - I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it, and I don't know anyone who would, so I've never understood what the buyer gets in this situation.

[pbhjpbhj]

Google, et al., may look like a clan of prescient mystics, but they're not. If you don't change the whois info they don't know the domain changed hands - indeed paid for links are really hard to spot algorithmically if done right. The regularity of updates will affect rank (increasingly it seems) but this can be maintained and content can be purchased at very low rates. Unless your site gets flagged for review by a human I think you're unlikely to be caught.

>I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it

My blog, for example, gets most hits for a couple of posts on the Safari browser. Despite being entirely unrelated I can drive traffic to other sites from this blog, not high value traffic for sure, but if I were looking to bolster my pageviews for some reason (1st round?) or give another site an injection of PageRank short term then it works well enough.

[chopsueyar]

Would you really notice one addtional href in the footer?

[pbhjpbhj]

Footer links are pretty much discounted, at least by Google, if the SE can sniff the context, FWIW.

[lsc]

no, but I'd notice the content change (assuming they changed authors.)