Should You Buy a Domain Name with an Existing Page Rank?

At any given moment there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of existing domain names up for sale. Some of these domains have been around long enough to have acquired a Google Page Rank and are often advertised like "8-year-old aged domain, Page Rank 4". The question is whether the Page Rank is legitimate, and whether that Page Rank will transfer over to you when you take possession of the domain.

First, the page rank may very well not be legitimate.  It is possible for Site A to fool Google by redirecting a domain to a high page rank domain, Site B, which will fool G into reporting Site A's Page Rank as Site B's.  Fortunately, this happens in a small minority of cases.  The way to check for it is to search Google for "cache:domain-name.com", which will show you the cached page that the search spider was looking at when it last crawled the domain in question.

You should also search for "info:domain-name.com", which should show you only one result:  the home page for domain-name.com.  If you get a different result, something is wrong, and you certainly shouldn't buy the domain.

Now as to the more difficult question of whether the Page Rank will carry over with the ownership change.  Actually, it's not such a difficult question at all - the answer is almost certainly "no".  The reason is that most of these domains have been dropped from the Google main search index - mostly for staleness and inactivity rather than misbehavior.

When you reactivate the domain, and get it added back into the main index, the Page Rank will be reevaluated and (in all probability) reset to zero.  That juicy Page Rank 4 will become a Page Rank 0.

This is not to say that the existing domain has no value.  Many people believe that so-called aged domains - those that have been in existence for several years, get indexed faster and rise more quickly in the SERPs.  Whether there is empirical evidence for that I don't know, but it's a widely held belief.  But as for the value of the existing Page Rank:  fugetaboutit.

Here's a checklist of things to do before you buy a domain:

• Go to checkpagerank.net and domainpagerank.com to check on the legitimacy of the Page Rank.
• Search for "info:domain-name.com".  If you see a listing other than the domain's home page, walk away.
• Search for "link:domain-name.com" to see what the existing backlinks (if any) look like.  No or few backlinks means a virtual certainty that the existing PR will not carry forward.
• Search for "site:domain-name.com" to see how many pages are in the Google index.  Make sure there's no spam, porn, or hate speech.
• Go to archive.org and search for "www.domain-name.com" to see a snapshot of pages that may have been dropped from Google.  Again, make sure there's no spam, porn, or hate speech.

It's perfectly fine, and possibly even advantageous, to buy an aged domain.  Just don't expect any existing Page Rank to carry over to your ownership, unless you're buying a whole website, not just a dormant domain.  If you could really buy a PR4 domain for $25, people would be lined up around the block.  Remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.