I recently purchased a Web site that was ranked number one on Google. Within 24 hours of the ownership change, Google dropped the ranking significantly to page five. Does Google look at DNS changes, and could this be the reason for the lower ranking? Any other ideas of what could have caused this? FYI, the ranking in Yahoo! was unaffected.

My initial reaction to this question was that you were trying to draw a casual relationship from correlational data (yeah, my Masters degree comes out in weird ways sometimes! ) and that this was basically a case of Google doing a “dance” coincidentally with your ownership change.

I thought it would be useful to ask some real SEO experts, however, so I sent out your query to a search engine marketing list I’m involved with, and the resultant answers were, well, darned surprising!

More than one person reported that they’d changed DNS records and almost instantly…