Avoid fake PR when purchasing an aged domain

Avoid fake PR when purchasing an aged domain
By John Motson

Whether you are just starting up, or you have been into making money online for a while, you will or have already had experience with purchasing a domain name. If purchasing a domain name for a new venture, a lot of people turn to aged domains – registering expired domains or purchasing a domain from a seller. Aged domains are domains that have been in use or at least registered previously.

Logically, aged domains are more popular than newly thought up domains. Besides the fact that the aged domain probably has lots of incoming links and traffic, Google and other search engine bots value aged domains higher than any newly created ones.

Since Google is today pretty much looked at as The Authority on ranking domains/websites, Google Page Rank (PR) is considered a key factor in valuing a domain name. When starting up a new venture, many website owners purchase a domain with an existing PR in order to get things rolling quicker.

For example, starting up a football forum using a three year old PR4 domain will get your website indexed by Google and receiving search traffic a lot faster then launching your football forum on a new domain which will usually be stuck in the Google sandbox for at least a few weeks.

This is where it gets interesting. Opportunists come out of the woodwork when they smell opportunity – obviously. In this case, the opportunists have no guilt or feeling of remorse for stooping to these methods.

Now, some of you might condemn me for revealing their methods, because someone reading this post might try this for themselves, but I am doing it to warn you. If we are aware of things like this happening, we can avoid the risk of it happening to us.

Brace yourself.

Google PR CAN BE FAKED!

Faking PR to dupe an unsuspecting domain buyer is extremely easy.

People fake PR by coding their site so that it looks specifically for the GoogleBot. Once GoogleBot visits their site, they simply redirect GoogleBot to a high PR ranking site. Hence PR checkers indicate the domain has the PR of the high PR ranking site that GoogleBot was redirected to.

So, if I wanted to fake dnxpert.com’s PR – current proud PR of 0 after 40 days of existence – I would redirect GoogleBot to Yahoo.com – and get dnxpert.com a PR of 9. Everybody else visiting the website, sees a normal website.

Now, you might say, but what if the domain is not resolving to any site – ie there is nowhere to hide the redirect code so how can the PR be faked?

Simple, the seller might have faked the PR, got it indexed by GoogleBot, then removed the site so that the domain does not resolve before they attempt to sell it to you. Since Google indexing does not happen immediately, this change might take a while to take effect and hence the fake PR will stand in the eyes of any normal PR checker tool.

Ok, now that I have scared you, here is how to detect fake PR.

Use a fake PR checker. A site I use often to check for fake PR is checkpagerank.net. They also provide useful additional information with regards to the domain name like the count of incoming links from the
major search engines, whether the domain has been listed in major directories etc. When the fake PR checker suspects false play with a site’s PR, it displays a warning amongst the results.

Important note: make sure you enter www.yourdomain.com in the search box. For example, here are the results for dnxpert.com http://www.checkpagerank.net/index.php?name=www.dnxpert.com&links=1

If you want to avoid using a fake PR checker, you can utilize Google cache. Type cache:domainnamethatyouwanttocheck.com in the Google search box and hit search. Google cache shows the site that the GoogleBot sees. So if I faked dnxpert.com PR value as explained above, cache:dnxpert.com would display the Yahoo.com in the result of the cache query.

I hope that you will consider fake PR the next time you decided to purchase an aged domain from a seller.

PS. Another thing many of us do is purchase links from higher PR sites in order to boost our own site’s PR. The reason we do this is so that Google bots notice that there is an incoming link from a higher PR site to our site. The bots then consider that our site’s information value is higher and hence our site’s PR gradually increases. Of course fake PR DOES NOT boost the PR of sites purchasing links on that website.

But opportunists are well aware that a lot of unsuspecting buyers do not know this. So, if you have purchased links from higher PR sites or directories, use one of the methods above to check whether you got what you paid for.

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