Originally Posted by SmokeyTheBear

damn good question .

my best guess would be there is no "domain wide" credit for having an old domain , i think its mostly page based . so in order to keep the "rank" credit from an old domain you would need to recreate the pages that were on the domain

i have noticed people doing this recently on .org domain sthat have recently expired.. i dont know if its just for "visual" or if its for google.

i.e. i came across some expired medical .org domains that were getting great serp for adult terms. when i visited the page it looks like an actual site like for example www.fightcancer.com and when i visit the page it looks like a cancer research website. but in the bottom of the page is hidden text links to porn pages.. at first im thinking that the site has just been hacked or something , but upon closer examination i see the domain was recently rebought . the buyer had copied the old pages from archive.org to make the site appear just as it was before it expired