If you go to any domain forum, you will see millions of people selling domains with Page Rank. Why are these domains attractive ? The answer is simple.

1.) Domains with existing page rank tend to have a few links pointing towards them already, and therefore the initial spade work is done. If the domain was acquired before it expired, then it will have the benefit of age too.

2.) People on the internet are always on the lookout for easy ways to make money.  PR domains can go for $ XXX ( especially the PR 5’s and ones above that ).

3.) For people who run blog networks and sell blog posts, acquiring these domains will help them avoid the time gap that it will take for a new domain to get Page Rank.

Their marketing becomes easier- I have 100 domains in this network- 10 PR 5’s 12 PR 4’s and so on.

So why shouldn’t you buy one ? Fake Page Rank, which I will touch upon in the later part of this post is one. The other reason being that Google could reduce the PR on the next update. So one day, you might have a domain selling for $ xx even if it does not make sense, simply because it has PR. The next day, the update takes place and the PR is lowered to zero, and the domain is worthless. Also, sites which linked to the domain previously will remove their links if they see that the site has gone down, or has been replaced by a completely new site.

What is Fake Page Rank ?

When one domain redirects to another site ( a 301 or 302 redirect usually), the domain gets the PR of the redirecting site.

How do you check for Fake PR ?

Tools like Check Page Rank and the one over at  Seo Logs

should do the job for you.

If you searched for the cached version of the page in Google, you will see the site that it has redirected to, and not the domain.