Website Investing
The seller of the tree network advertised the "Hub" site had a Google Page Rank (PR) of two. Of the 32 domins, 23 had sites with content. The other names were the plural or singular version and point to the other.
The template being used and the content of the sites looked pretty, but a close reading of the text convinced me it was not unique. I didn't bother checking, but I would guess it had been abstracted from Wikipedia articles on the various tree species and was not unique. It certainly contained nothing that could not be found in any generic article about trees. In other words, I bought the domains knowing I would need to replace the content with better material.
The PR(2) "hub" page consisted of only a pretty image with links to the other 23 domains. There was nothing there that would allow a search engine to index anything and value the site. I am sure the PR2 the domain showed was the result of links from other sites which the seller bought or controled which would have little long term value.
The linking from the Hub to the other domains was done with php includes rather than static links with anchor text. That seemed strange. It works, but it would not pass page rank to the linked sites. I am not enough of a programmer to really understand why it might have been done that way, but it is clearly not how the average website builder would approach things. I got the feel of an article site refined to spread the articles across multiple keyword domains.
I also did a google search on some of the domains to see if they might have had a history I should know about. I found a few references that made me think they might have been involved in some way/shape/form with spam.
Based on this feeling, as soon as the domains were "pushed" to my account I changed the name servers to point to a host where I had not yet set up hosting accounts. In other words, anyone going to the domain will get a "Server not found" message. I will leave them that way for a few months to make sure the search engines notice and, hopefully, disconnect myself from any past bad behavior.
My missgivings were justified because a couple of days later the seller posted about receiving an email from Google warning her that her adsense account was in danger because of bad behavior on some of her other accounts. As near as I can tell the problem was related to running a proxy server and some resulting confusion when visitors used her proxy site to link through to bad neighborhoods. She was able to fix the problem but I remain convinced the domains I bought need a "cooling off" period.