Daily Domain Name Registration Blog

Pre-owned domains can be extremely useful for instant traffic. However, they can cause the domainer all sorts of problems, as you inherit the previous owner’s baggage when you buy their domain. They’re not always what they seem, either, since a lot of domains with alleged high PageRank are a waste of money.

After last week’s post about buying domains on eBay, someone asked me about the issue of PageRank when you’re buying expired or pre-owned domain names: is it worth paying more for expired domains with high PR, and how can you avoid being conned?

As with every market, there are scammers all over the place in the domain reselling industry. You’ll notice that a lot of domains up for sale on eBay have the PageRank highly advertised, especially by sellers who specialise in domain names. You’ve probably heard of someone who got hit by a scammer, buying a domain they thought had a PR of five or six and ending up with a big, fat zero.

This is because scammers are able to exploit a loophole in Google’s PageRank system. To avoid temporary manipulation of PageRank, the info that determines what you see in the little green bar is only exported to the Toolbar every three months or so. That’s right - it doesn’t show the page’s current PR, but its PR from up to three months in the past.

It’s easy to see how scammers take advantage of this. They boost a website’s PR temporarily by begging, stealing or borrowing links from dozens of other websites (often using nefarious tactics such as blog spamming). Then, when Google exports the new PR stats, the scammer gets rid of the inward-bound links (particularly the paid ones, which are costing them money), and puts the domain up for sale. As a conscientious shopper, you visit the domain before you decide to buy, and sure enough, the little green bar indicates a PageRank of 6. Impressed, you buy the domain, only to find that it fails to perform well in the SERPs (the Toolbar may display old PR, but Google’s search results use much more up-to-date information), and in three months’ time, it’s down to zero and you have a worthless white elephant of a domain name on your hands.

So is it worth buying domains with a high PR, given this high chance of being taken for a ride?

I’d argue that yes, it is still worth buying high PR domain names, as long as you know what you’re doing. There are certainly ways of protecting yourself against fraud.

• Please do go and look at the current PR of the domain. Sometimes sellers just lie, hoping you won’t check, or they forget about a Google Toolbar export.
• Consider the quality of the website to which the domain resolves. If it contains some useful content that seems to be relevant to the domain name, that’s a good start. If it’s just a holding page, it’s likely that any PR it has will rapidly vaporise.
• The comprehensive WHOIS search at DomainTools.com allows you to check out when a domain was registered, by whom it is hosted, and whether it has its own IP address. For the cost of Silver Membership ($15/month), you can also check networks and blacklists to find out more about the history of the domain you are chasing.
• Consider checking the Way Back Machine to see what the domain has been linked to in the past. This can give you an insight into the kind of links that the site may be receiving, and you may also wish to avoid associating yourself with domains which used to host unsuitable content.
• Check the legitimacy of the PageRank using the Fake PageRank Detection Tool at SEO Logs.
• Try one of the many PageRank prediction tools available to see what the PR of the page is likely to be after the next export.

If you do all these checks before signing on the dotted line, you should avoid being fooled by unscrupulous domain resellers. However, bear in mind that even if the advertised PR of a domain is legitimate, it still may not be worth paying over the odds.

• PR is based on both quantity and quality of links. High PR on a domain which is associated with a site that is full of content that has nothing to do with the site you want to use it for is next to worthless. The anchor text of links to your site will be irrelevant, and the links will be coming from pages which are unrelated to your initiative. If you are buying a high PR domain, make sure that the links that boosted its ranking are going to be relevant to your own site.
• If a webmaster uses paid links to boost PR, you’ll have to keep paying to keep that PR.
• Deep linking ratios are taken into account by Google, and a domain with high PR won’t help you with that - remember that it’s PageRank, not DomainRank, so the fact that your homepage has a high PR will not make a difference to the PR of your internal pages, and these are often the most important in terms of your SERPs.

Resources:

See when to expect the next PR export with The SEO Company’s PageRank Export History page.

Jerry West on PageRank.

Brian Jackson on Domain Name Sale Scams: High PageRank Domains