Brendon Scott… although I rarely use it anywhere. TallTroll has such “brand recognition” as I possess

Whilst those links do occasionally show up in data, I think they are demonstrably not being counted, else you’d still see rankings for the original terms. I’d allow that the domain age may have an effect – it is an older domain, but the link data is gone.

Note that if you don’t change one of the whois or content significantly, you don’t see the effect. As another example, I bought a fresh reg domain that acquired some links (which is kind of wierd, since the domain NEVER had any content on it – you got the server default page), and later added content. The old link data got reset. Since the domain was a fresh reg, by me, I know for certain it’s history etc, and I think it’s a pretty clear cut case. The whois “changed” (the registration), then later the content – and bam, reset the data which had been stable for years.

If both the whois data and the content change substantially, yes. Since I assume you’d probably want to keep it as an SEO site, I think you’d dodge the bullet there.

I did exactly this for a client in the travel industry who acquired an excellent domain, that had been used for hosting information about an educational program. It had some decent links (.edu’s etc), but they were all way off topic.

The change of whois and content have “reset” the site for the travel industry, where it now has excellent first page rankings for competitive, 2 word generic terms, I’m happy to say, and no visibility for the old educational terms

What if someone buys an old domain but doesn’t change it’s flavor and just continues on building it in the same direction?

Like for instance, my buddy has an old SEO website that we both worked on, I pay the hosting, now he is thinking about getting out of the business. Are you saying that if I get that domain transferred to myself Google will treat it as a new site and it will lose something just from the transfer of ownership?