[...] use it to weed out domains that have changed ownership? After all, that’s one of the reasons Google became a domain registrar in the first [...]

[...] Answers: 1. Yes, Google is an accredited registrar. But they didn’t become a registrar in order to sell domain registrations. Domain registration is a low margin business and only makes sense if you are cross-selling other services. Google became a registrar so it could get its hands more easily on Whois data that would help them understand when domain names expired and exchanged hands. Getting this data would help Google cleanse its search index of domains. Alas, this didn’t work out as planned for the search giant. Registrars changed the way they deleted expiring domains by directly transferring them to new owners through services like SnapNames. The registration data in the Whois database wasn’t reset and Google couldn’t easily track these changes. [...]

I think Google’s point is that if a lot of their search results point to parked pages, the quality of there results will be viewed poorly by their users. Their main goal in life is to keep search users happy.

Frank has a good point, and so does the article. Its also fascinating to wonder why Google would want to eliminate a large portion of their ad revenue from domains that retain their traffic stats after owner transfer, when most of the domains being transferred before the drop (or after) will have landing pages on them. A large portion of those landing pages are featuring Google ads. I’m hesitant to accept Google’s reasoning at face value for their concern regarding not being able to delete expiring domains from their index.

There is still some mythology surrounding the claim that an expiring domain has lost its page rank with Google, so it loses its value. It’s not usually the case, but the argument continues.

There are two different ways how domains are re-registered when they expire today.

Some registrars have an exclusive partnership with a drop names provider (example: Register.com/Snapnames), or their own program (Example: Enom/Clubdrop).

In the case of these exclusive partnerships the domain name actually is never dropped at the registry, just the owner changes after the name has been sold in an auction. The creation date will note change.

The other case is the one were the domains still go through the normal Hold, Redemption and Pending Delete cycle and the domain is actuall re-registered the moment it becomes available again (via Pool, Snapnames or Enom’s Clubdrop). In this case the creation date changes.