Do any of you regularly use expired domains?

[MarieHaynes]

I may not have explained myself completely.  These are domains that I bought that have incoming links and PR.

They definitely did help my first site really well.

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Steve, thanks. I see what you mean, and can't disagree with your thinking... I personally would prefer to spend that hour (or so) trying to get a link to the primary site. But I can understand why others would rather just create one.
We're both assuming that someone would use different hosts, right?
I'm also curious to know, where would you 'draw the line' so-to-speak?
I mean, domain names are only about $10 each, so you could 5, 10, 100. etc. At some point, you would be building an 'unnatural' link profile, and begin to raise flags.  And me being a skeptic, I tend to lean towards as natural of link profiles as possible.

[MarieHaynes]

The domains that I bought have existing links and PR.  It took some time for the PR to come back, but in the ones I have used so far they seem to be helping.

[DonnieCooper]

Are they currently existing?
Did the DNS info reset to your contact info after you bought them? If so, the PR may get reset as well. 
Are the sites relevant to the primary site's niche?

[MarieHaynes]

The PR seems to come back after a couple of months.  Some are relevant to my niche and some are not.  But, as stated in the question, the question was not so much about whether or not this tactic works, but rather, whether Mozzers are using it.  I don't want to do anything immoral or unethical.

[DonnieCooper]

If the site's are relevant for the niche, I may consider 301 redirecting page by page to the primary niche..... or instead, you could just link them over as you're doing. Would it be possible to contact the inbound linking domains, and ask them to link to your primary site instead?  
If the niches are all relevant, I would build pages on the primary site to reflect the secondary site's content. Then redirect page by page. Then contact the linking domains and ask them to update their links. 
Does this help Dunamis?

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks Donnie...sorry that this convo is getting confusing (as I replied below as well).  My question was more about the ethics of using this tactic rather than how to do it.

[DonnieCooper]

Yeah, sorry too. Ethically, I would say it's gray hat on a small scale, and black hat on larger scale. Of course, that's completely subjective. But I say this because, the main purpose of the secondary site's existence would be, in fact, to 'trick' search engines.
Just my opinion. I also can understand Steve's point of view.

[SteveOllington]

Yeah I'm totally with you on that, I wouldn't bother buying a bunch of domains to build sites with, all to link in... Google will know anyway, it'll spot a footprint one way or another. I'm just thinking for the sake of not wasting an already owned domain... would hate to think of it sat there doing nothing when it could be doing something, even if that something is tiny lol.

[SteveOllington]

I wouldn't call it unethical unless you made a habit of it with loads of sites, all providing no value. It's never worth focusing on micro-sites, but if there's a couple there, might as well use them