Beware High Page Rank Expired Domain Fraud

Buying established domains with existing page rank and back-links is a recognised method for starting a new website with a bit of extra ‘kick’.

The problem is new trends attract new opportunists.

Jerry West, an experienced SEO analyst and affiliate marketer has just released an interesting article on how these scammers are operating and details how to protect yourself from potential false high PR expired domain purchases.

Jerry says that these scammers take advantage of the fact that most marketers don’t fully understand how the Google PR score works. He says that PR (PageRank) is in fact delayed by 3 to 5 months in the Google toolbar much in the same way a free online tool for stock quotes delays the quotes by 15 minutes.

This means that when you are looking to purchase an expiring domain you are making a value judgement based on an old PageRank score.

The actual PR of the domain at the time your are looking to buy could be completely different to what the little green PR bar is reporting.

He stated that eBay is particularly bad for this at the moment so watch out when looking to buy via eBay.

What the scammers are doing is getting hold of a domain and pushing up the PR by begging for all the links they can and by also buying high PR links. They let the domain build up a decent PR in the Google toolbar then cancel all the paid high PR inbound links and quickly try to flog it.

Jerry lists a few thing you can do to check the domain and PR is legit:

1. First actually go to the domain and check the PageRank matches their claim.
2. When at the domain note whether a real site is present. If only a place holder is there chances are the domain is dead.
3. Jerry then says you need to look at the site history. Perform a whois search on the domain and look at who owns it, for how long, where is it hosted, is it on a shared or dedicated IP. Some good sites to help with these checks are: http://www.domaintools.com and http://www.archive.org
4. You should always check if the site is still indexed in Google. Jerry says that just because a site has a PR it does not necessarily mean that it is indexed. Perform both of these search queries on the domain to check Google’s cache and indexing of the domain: “cache:domain.com” and “site:domain.com”
5. Last but not least verify the PageRank. Use the following PR checking services and tools: SEO Logs and PageRank Predictor and finally Yahoo!’s Site Explorer

This is just a quick synopsis of Jerry’s article. To read the full article pop over here to check out all the details. He’s even got a video demonstrating this high PR expired domain fraud and shows you how to look for potential domains worth buying.

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5 March 2007 | Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | Comments