Buying domains with Google PR
Is it worth buying domain names with Google PR? I’ve done a few experiments with this in the past 6 months. I purchased some domains that already had PR on them. I wanted to see if i would lose the PR when the next update occured. I first bought my PR domain for around $40. I was such a noob. I now realize that i overpaid for that domain. If you are thinking about buying dropped or expired domains with PR, don’t pay too much for them. Buy them if you like the name, but don’t buy it for the PR. Cause you’re going to lose the PR. Making money online is about learning from you experiences. If you experiement often, then you’ll gain more understanding of how you can make money online.
I bought over 20 domain names with PR on them. 18 of them lost their Google PR, and the other’s dropped in PageRank. I’ve read about some people keeping the PR on the domains they bought. Because of my personal experience, i don’t believe it. Google pagerank is all about links. Your site needs to have a lot of links in order for it to get PR. If it doesn’t, then on the next update, you will surely lose your PR.
I think that there is value in domain names that have been aged. From my experience, i’ve noticed that aged domains tend to get indexed a lot faster. Google is more willing to trust sites that have an old domain. A lot of mega sites buy aged domains to launch their new website. Facebook bought an old domain to launch their social networking site. If it works for the big guys, it works for small time bloggers as well.
On the plus side, domains that have been aged, could retain their PR because they might still have links to them. Unless a website gets sold or it expires, the archived links will remain in place. Because of this, i try to only buy domains that have been dropped or aged. If a domain has PR on it, then so be it. I don’t buy domains just for the PR anymore. You shouldn’t either. If you do, don’t pay more then double the normal registration fee.
It’s better to buy a domain name that is 5 years old, over a domain that has PageRank 5.
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July 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
Hey that is weird because I bought this pr4 domain emac2006.org for 1.99 and was doing a little experimenting.When I asked around these so called gurus just made themselves look stupid and didn’t or couldn’t answer the guestion?About the page lossing rank.I put that feedjit widget on there and can only imagine what the people that were aligned/linked to the old site nust think cause I see they stop by.Anyway it was just an experiment.When is that update I see a lot of sweet sites parked on zero.Google better bust out with the green:)
I like your point about building link and making your site pretty later.
Thanks
ps somehow last night I ended up on your books lulu site so I whipped a stumble on it;)
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:56 am
john sullivan- let me know how your experiment pans out when google updates.
i’m not sure if the PR always gets stripped, but i think it’s safe to say that most of the time, it does. Never buy a domain just for the PR. Buy domains that have been aged. An old domain is really valuable. I recently bought a domain that was registered in 1996. Awesome domain!
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:46 am
I assume the site has to have been live for all of the years since it’s been registered? I’m asking because I have a URL that I’ve owned since 2000, but it was only live for about a year, years ago. Since then, I’ve kept renewing the name but there’s been no site.
Two questions:
1) Have I benefitted at all from having an older URL, but without a site on it?
2) Assuming I don’t want to put a big, real site on it, should I activate it at all now to make it “age” better? If so, what would you recommend as a low-cost, not too difficult way of improving it? A small site with a few generic articles? Or what?
Thanks for a great blog!
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:46 am
Tom- was the domain parked with your registrar? It’s better if there was a working site on it. But even if it was just parked, the renew of the domain give it’s value. As long as google knows that the domain is old, then you should be able to grow it faster then an newly registered domain. So 1) yes u have. u should have put a site on it, but still better then a fresh domain. 2) yeah, u answered your own question. I have close to 300 domain names in my portfolio. I’ve been buying a lot lately. Althought i haven’t gotten around to setting up sites on all of them yet. I plan to. I put up wordpress blogs on sites that i think i will work on a little bit. For sites that i don’t think i’ll touch, i just put up a few html pages with keyword rich content. Most shared hosting providers allow unlimited addon domains. So the cost is not an issue. The issue is more about time.
Thanks for reading my blog! “great blog” u flatter me.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Thanks for the reply. Yes, it’s been parked for years. I have a shared hosting provider, so I will probably use that & stick a Wordpress blog on it, as it’s probably easier (at least for me) than building html pages.
(Do you build your own html pages for your other sites, or do you use templates? I have Dreamweaver, but find it really overwhelming. I suppose I should start learning a little html. And I hear you really need at least a little competence in PHP - ugh.)
In terms of time being the issue, is it primarily creating content? Or building the pages? (Both, I imagine.)
Thanks again for any reply.
(BTW, your animations are hilarious.)
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
tom- you don’t have to thank me for that. I appreciate you taking interest in my little blog. I say you should do what you’re most comfortable with doing. if wordpress is easy for you, then yeah, you should do a quick fantastico install of wordpress and use it has a static site. You can set it up to just show static pages.
i have and use dreamweaver. You’re right, it’s not for the noob of heart. It’s a rather complex editor. But you should start messing with it now, so you can use it later. That’s what i’m doing. Don’t worry too much about all the coding languages. Baby steps. One days it’ll start making sense.
time…yeah, i’m talking about content creation. Buidling pages is not hard. You can just use free templates. Content creation can be sped up by using content creator software. My only beef with content creating software is that, they don’t create good content. A lot of the software creates post or pages that look like keyworded spam.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[...] a good investment because you usually lose PR in the next google update. At any rate, people love buying domain names with PR. If you are interested in buying PR domains, you have to watch out for the fake or forged PR. You [...]
July 25th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
[...] read a post about that very situation for someone that had purchased domains with high PR, only to realize that the value was no longer present or was [...]
February 20th, 2009 at 10:10 am
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February 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am
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