Beware! - Faked Domain PR Auctions Still Exist
- Posted by Jordan
- 23 September 2011
Now I am not trying to say that these auctions were ever out of the online webmaster community but there seems to have been a vast increase in the number of ‘premium’ domain sellers that are looking to try their luck in one of the oldest possible ways, and its working!
Online forums are riddled with webmasters that are constantly looking to sell domains, whether they are legitimate, dropped, aged, new or just that they need the funds from the sale to pay the bills, whatever the reason, there are thousands of domains listed for sale each and every day.
Lately I have been looking at expanding a football news network that I have even toyed with the prospect of adding dropped domains into the network in a move to help to expand the surface area of the site, so having one generic football news site and then club specific like Chelsea news, Arsenal News…
Today I have been looking about for ways in which I can further the size of my network and it seems that there is a huge number of Google PageRank domains being listed for sale over on DigitalPoint forums, a well known online webmaster site that seems to attract a huge variety of people.
With everything from hints and tips to scammers and complete and utter deceit, there is never a quiet day on the forum, there will always be some sort of confrontation or angry exchange in at least on of the threads on there.
Today I have had to offer up my opinion on a matter where one seller was looking to sell his “Valid PR7 Domain” and as I am always on the lookout for something with such high equity, I chipped in to see what sort of price the seller was looking for the domain.
After looking at the backlinks on the site, it soon became obvious that the site was not supported on high authority backlinks or anything even remotely close to that, instead the links into the site were little more than comment spam on posts that were carrying no PR what-so-ever.
I politely told the seller that I was not interested in the domain based on this fact and was told that the domain had survived the previous PR update (done in early August), puzzled I thought I would check the WhoIs information.
Just as I thought, it was a dropped domain that had been registered 15 days after the update, so that to me says that the links that must have given the domain the PR in the first place had been removed within the time between the update and me checking the backlinks.
So again I advised the seller on my findings and again I was told that I was wrong…
“Okay, you sell it to some other sucker then”
Yeah it was a little blunt but questioning my findings on the site when I knew that they were right really got under my skin.
So there I go, heading off to look at other potential gold mines and I get news that there is someone else adding their opinion on the sale thread, someone defending the seller for his antics and saying that he had bought many domains from him before and that people like me need to “go away and learn something”.
Right! Time to give this guy a dressing down and leave him feeling a little disorientated.
20 minutes of writing a reply and the job was done, fake PR domain once again avoided.
This got me thinking about many of the domains that are listed on the site, so I decided to have a look at 5 high PR domains that were listed for sale on the same site, see if the domains are legitimate or whether again these are the good old 301 redirect and then break redirect after PR update additions…
What a shock, 80% of the domains were little more than fake PR domains yet they were selling to webmasters on the forum for as much as $220!!
It seems that although there are a few webmasters out there that are able to avoid buying these domains as they look into a number of things to do with the domain but there are also so many people that are being mis-sold domains.
If you are on the look out for high PR domains, remember to:
Check the backlinks on the site – There should be a number of backlinks that are higher in PR than the domain in question.
Check the WhoIs information – Have a look at the creation date, is the domain aged or has the seller picked up the domain the day before and now they are looking to sell?
Tags: auctions, fake pr, pr domains
