Google, et al., may look like a clan of prescient mystics, but they're not. If you don't change the whois info they don't know the domain changed hands - indeed paid for links are really hard to spot algorithmically if done right. The regularity of updates will affect rank (increasingly it seems) but this can be maintained and content can be purchased at very low rates. Unless your site gets flagged for review by a human I think you're unlikely to be caught.
>I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it
My blog, for example, gets most hits for a couple of posts on the Safari browser. Despite being entirely unrelated I can drive traffic to other sites from this blog, not high value traffic for sure, but if I were looking to bolster my pageviews for some reason (1st round?) or give another site an injection of PageRank short term then it works well enough.
>I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it
My blog, for example, gets most hits for a couple of posts on the Safari browser. Despite being entirely unrelated I can drive traffic to other sites from this blog, not high value traffic for sure, but if I were looking to bolster my pageviews for some reason (1st round?) or give another site an injection of PageRank short term then it works well enough.