Expired Domains with Fake PR (Page Rank)

• No Traffic

A really nasty trap with buying traffic by recycling expired domains is that the Google PR might have been faked. You need to know this because the name may have no traffic in its own right

• Redirect Script

What the faker does is write a sneaky little script to detect Google-bot and redirect it to some page with massive or higher PR. This then causes the PR of that page to show in the Google tool bar instead of the real PR. This works because the page rank is computed from the actual page referenced; in this case someone else’s high rank page.

• 301 Redirect

Another twist on the same theme is where the whole domain, usually just a single page, is referred using a 301 redirection – again the PR of the final destination page is quoted in the Google tool bar. Today on PRTag.com there is an expired domain with a PR8 rating for sale for $35. It is fake PR, because there is a 301 redirect to a different website. The actual domain name has no PR at all.

• Check that the PR is for real.

So if you are buying an expired or re-used domain, check that the PR is for real. Here are a couple of tools to use to verify that the expired domains don’t have fake PR:

http://www.tracerank.com/

http://checkpagerank.net/index.php?name=opotiki.com&links=1

http://www.domainpagerank.com/

• Check the Google (or MSN) cache

Another quick check is to compare the actual domain with the domain and content in the Google cache. If they don’t match, that might just be the ‘fakin’ reason.

• No Comeback

The kind of nasty that would do this trick is the same kind of nasty that would refuse to give your money back when you complained about them selling you expired domains with fake PR, so do your checking first.

• UPDATE – Page Redirects

Another method is when the cheat uses the REFRESH command to redirect the URL to a page with high PR:

E.G. - <  meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.topPRpage.com/" >

They might even include some script to force the address bar to show the original URL to make the deception complete!