Page Rank Fraud - watch out!

Page Rank Fraud - watch out!

If you are going to buy an old domain, risk of beware to fall prey to PageRank fraud. There is a whole industry domain selling tricksters who sell old domains with fraudulent or hijacked PageRank.

Without going into the details of how they do it (not letting bottom-feeders replicate this), simply summarize a list of points to check PR validity before you decide to purchase an existing domain:

1. Check PR manually. Trust what you are saying. Go and check PR using the Google Toolbar for Firefox or an SEO plugin (such as SeoQuake for Firefox). Make sure it has the same value as the buyer says it is.

2. Check backlinks. Type in Google link: www.site.com, where www.site.com is the domain you want to buy. A more convenient way to check backlinks would be to use the SeoQuake plugin. If the site has PR = 4, then it should have at least 3 backlinks with PR5, or 18 backlinks with PR4, or 101 links with PR3, or 505 links with PR2 or 3055 links with PR1. If it is a mixture of various PR links, you can use this table to estimate the PR calculation of what PR site should be according to the number of links found.

3. Check Google cache. It turns out that if you redirect a domain to a high PR site, then the redirecting domain displays the PageRank of the destination site even after some time the redirect is removed. This is the trick that domain-selling fraudsters use to sell low-PR domains at a high price, and newbies, who know the trick, readily buy into this. To avoid such fraud, check your cache by typing in Google search cache: www.site.com, where site.com is the domain you want to buy. Make sure a copy of the site is saved in the Google cache that looks exactly the same as what you are buying.

4. Use PR predictor. Bear in mind, the Google Toolbar updates PR only every 3 months or so, even though the displayed PR may be 5, the actual PR may be zero. Why? Because domain-selling tricksters may have bought some high PR links just before the latest PR update and then took them off. So in reality, the actual domain PR may be dropped to 0. To verify that a PageRank predictor is used at pagerankprediction.com or link.ezer.com, which should tell you the approximate current value of the site PageRank.

5. Check WhoIS records. Using the SeoQuake or SeoToolbar plugins for Firefox, or going directly to the Whois-domain-tools to check the WHOIS records of the domain. Explore them and see if there are any other domains on the same IP address, or if the same owner has lots of other domains in general. If you see the owner has hundreds of different domains, especially if many of them are on the same IP, I would be very reluctant to buy the domain in question.

6. Check the web archive. Finally, if all previous checks were clear, go to archive.org and trace the history of that domain. If you see that the domain used to have a drug smuggler or kinky porn site on it, this may reduce the chances that you will still want to buy it to absolute zero.

I hope you get the point. Be careful and careful fall prey to domain-selling swindlers. Do you want to pay for your money for nothing, or do you?