If you change nameservers on a domain, do you get penalized in google?
 

A friend of mine was telling me if you change nameservers on a domain, you'll get hurt in google (it "erases seo history" to quote) because they see it the domain as "changing hands".. and he believes this because it is based on personal experience after having purchased a site from someone and changing nameservers.

im pretty certain this is bullshit because that makes no sense.. how would google know you just aren't changing hosts, which isn't an action you would think should be penalized.

i don't see why it would make a difference, google indexes web pages not name servers surely ?

I have never had that affect my sites. I have move some more than once and no changes.

complete hobblewash.

If there is penalization for that it would be rather insignificant, I have seen on some SEO boards that if you change IPs x amount of times within x amount of days it will damage rankings. I guess they would consider the site unstable and not a content driven user experience.

i had a site drop right off googles radar after switching nameservers and i was getting tons of traffic to that domain , but it could have just been coincidence as well.