PR8 Domain Bargain or a Lemon?

[silverski]

I applied for an expiring domain in February. I then went on holiday and forgot about it until I received the notification at the end of march 07 that the domain was now mine. Basically the topic of the domain was not something i could immediately use so i just left it. (Frankly i didnt know why i bid for it!) Yesterday i discovered that it had PR8.

Unfortunately at the time of transfer the creation date was adjusted to end of March and previous history/creation date has disappeared.

The only backlinks appear to be relating to domain drops.
Furthermore the wayback machine only shows 1 page of history for feb 07.

So i have 3 questions

1/ Would the previous owner or google do something to avoid the page rank being carried over? Hence the false creation date and no wayback history?

2/ Can i do anything to restore this domain to its former glory and get some PR benefit?

3/Or am i just sitting on a lemon?

I look forward to your comments.

[tedster]

1. The previous owner wouldn't do it, but I've heard reports that Google sometimes resets backlink influence to zero when a domain name is allowed to expire.

2. You can try, but the odds are with a previously expired domain that you'll need to do a lot of your own growing of the domain. Second thought - did you also buy the content? If so, putting it back online immediately and as it was would likely give you a much better start. Then, over time, you can adapt it to your own purposes.

3. Lemonade is always a possibility -- even a lemon meringue pie.

[edited by: tedster at 5:13 pm (utc) on July 3, 2007]

[Miamacs]

uh... PR8 with only 1 archive date and nothing but domain drop notices for backlinks? Doesn't that sound a little suspicious?

I'm not sure if I'd believe that number.

...

Check Yahoo! for the backlinks of subpages, then check the archives for subdomains ( if there were any ) and if still nothing memorable is showing up, that PR8 is most likely fake, a redirect or whatever.

Or the PR of the domain parking service... or perhaps the SSH server.

But as tedster said... if you let the domain sleep for four to five months, don't really expect that PR to "come back" as soon as you launch the site. Even if it really was PR8. Which I'd doubt.

[silverski]

Thanks you for both your replies.

I checked both yahoo and google for backlinks without success.

However i guess that leaving it parked and not acting on it at the time has made it difficult to get any real assesment of its history.

Tedster i loved your idea of lemon meringue pie. So I will have some washed down with Limoncello.

:-)

[Mhmt]

Have you checked if it is valid PR8, most of the high PR dropped domains actually have fake PageRank.

[wanna_learn]

In any case if you have spent only a few $ to obtain the domain name its time to ask few questions to yourself
1) If its a fake PR, is that domain name of your real business use? What is the worth?
2) If its a fake PR, how long will it stay? If it stays for a few months to go then you can enjoy lemonade
3) If its a real PR, would you be able to maintain it by putting up something very logical on it to maintain the backlinks and whatever? Whats the commercial use?
4) There are several Green Juice fans here! you think you can resell it and buy few oranges ;-)

[igorberger]

Just set up a nice little top page with some comments about what you want to do with the lemon and see if it gets indexed and get hist for the keywords, if it does you will have lemonade if not thorw away the lemon....

I have a domain that just says Hello World, Foo with a link to a project.
It got indexed in one day, and gets first place in organic search for the content keywords.

So brand new out of a box, and already a fighter...

Tha's my baby..Foo. :)