NO. PR is totally depended on the people that link to you.

I think it can affect your PR,at least a bit

SEO the website

The answer here depends on exactly what you mean by that catch-all phrase "SEO".

As walkman said, PageRank (for a page) is defined only by the links from other pages. If your SEO efforts change your own site's internal linking, and if you have a lot of deep links from other domains, then you may not be "circulating" the PR they voted to you in the same way -- and that could cause a drop in PR for your home page.

Also, if your changes make it so the target urls for inbound links no longer resolve, that could affect PR of various other urls on your domain, including the domain root (home page).

Key point -- PR is assigned to a page, and not to a website. Another key -- PageRank is about links. While the other issues raised may certainly affect your rankings on various terms, they will not directly change PageRank.

[edited by: tedster at 3:34 am (utc) on Aug. 20, 2006]

Thanks Tedster for your valuable inputs. I am new to search Engine Optimization and your inputs have cleared a few doubts I had.

By SEO I meant - Optimizing the pages for specific keywords,
- Modify the Page Title to make it easy for people to find these pages
- adding Meta Description for Important pages and
- Improve the Internal Linking of pages (in many pages you have to click the back button of the browser)

Thanks once again

Nannu

If Google believes the site has been restarted then it will wipe the PR of the incoming links - significant changes on top of a whois change may force this flag; we don't know exactly what their indicators are :(
While I have no proof, I do not believe that Google do this purely from a whois change, as it doesnt allow for businesses moving and personnel changing.
I would suggest you *either* change the whois *or* change the site now, but not both.
Obviously having bought the site, you need to change the whois. You may need to change the hosting.
I would suggest you do those two and do not change the site otherwise for at least a couple of months, then do a few (of the really necessary) changes over a few months, then do any major changes you need to.
What would be ideal would be if you know what sort of update rate the site had previously - did they change it constantly, or did it hardly ever change? If you can match that rate you should be golden - wayback machine may help?

Thanks Leadegroot for your views.

I am sure you all will make me learn the SEO game fast. ;)

To begin with I am planning to just add adsense scripts & my Product ads to the pages (without disturbing the hosting/whois/keyword optimising etc).

Gradually over a period of time (12 Month Time Frame), I'll do the other changes.

The site has not been updated since last three years. Before that (since Year 1999) they had been updating it regularly (minimum 2 to 3 times a week)