Buying a website purely for its age and/or PR authority

[garethb]

make sure if you do purchase it no to leave any trace that the link is owned/being paid for by the same person.

Would I be right in thinking then that multiple hosting accounts are common once a portfolio gets to a significant size - even when you can in theory manage "unlimited" domains within your original hosting package?

Peter I find over the years that this is the cheapest option to link building. You can control all aspects of the links from when, what and how they are placed. Even deep linking is easy because you control it. Without paying a small fortune try do deeplinking for a product and see what that will cost. As long as the site is on topic and and your content with the link/deeplink is ontopic.

Interesting to get both points of view here in terms of the efficiency of buying a site for the linking benefit vs doing the linking "legwork" alone. I had wondered whether buying the site wasn't just am expensive route to get links but appreciate the control aspect mentioned by grynge. Also, I've wondered about whether the current links would actually remain once the site changes into my hands or whether there aren't some important ones that might be removed/lost once any transfer completes. The site would obviously still have its age etc but would I'm guessing its PR would suffer if some of the links went. Not sure what benefit there'd be purely from the age of a site..

[grynge]

Would I be right in thinking then that multiple hosting accounts are common once a portfolio gets to a significant size - even when you can in theory manage "unlimited" domains within your original hosting package?

Yes I have multiple hosting accounts from free ones to my own servers, it just depends on what I plan to do with the site. If you have your own server buying multiple ip's is always a cheap way for some under the radar hosting.

Interesting to get both points of view here in terms of the efficiency of buying a site for the linking benefit vs doing the linking "legwork" alone. I had wondered whether buying the site wasn't just am expensive route to get links but appreciate the control aspect mentioned by grynge. Also, I've wondered about whether the current links would actually remain once the site changes into my hands or whether there aren't some important ones that might be removed/lost once any transfer completes. The site would obviously still have its age etc but would I'm guessing its PR would suffer if some of the links went. Not sure what benefit there'd be purely from the age of a site..

Aged domains used to have a benefit, but I think most people would agree parking domains now is not a good idea if you plan on just aging the domain. Now it is aged content and aged links that have benefit.
When I buy a site I never go into an agreement whereby I have to keep old links or such and such content. If the seller wants that but still wants to sell the site the seller should repay the original purchaser of links/content before selling the site. PR has little to do anymore with getting traffic from SE's, you need content and links to get traffic, some of my best traffic sites have little to no pr. I have a collection of high pr sites (PR6 and above) which all get very little traffic and really (used to) be only good for selling links.

[DaveR]

In the post-Panda/Penguin era, do these high PR, low-to-no-content, aged domains even have relevance anymore?

Seems like all searches I've performed post-Panda and Penguin have deindexed such sites and even those links are worthless now. Although I suppose it would depend on the site. If you had something with worthwhile but old content that was on-topic and relevant to your niche, that might be valuable. But most sites that fit the "high PR, link category" don't seem to fit in that bucket...

[Clinton]

It may not be domain age that matters so much as the age of the IBLs. Google knows that the earlier the IBL, the more trustworthy it's likely to be ...and that could be a factor in ranking.

[Brassneck]

In the post-Panda/Penguin era, do these high PR, low-to-no-content, aged domains even have relevance anymore?

Seems like all searches I've performed post-Panda and Penguin have deindexed such sites and even those links are worthless now..

A

Do you have examples that have gone. I know of lots of sites which still exist.

We have a fair few sites with strong inbound links with good pr and authority but don't have much traffic and therefore make little cash, but we do get approaches for links from them so clearly they have some value.

[Clinton]

Brassneck, nice to see you back.

Do you have examples that have gone. I know of lots of sites which still exist.

It's easy to challenge a position and demand evidence. But that would seem less like post count building if you provided evidence for the contrary position you're taking.

Any good example of such domains that still rank high ...and what terms do they rank high for?

[crabfoot]

Gargyl tells us, quite emphatically and frequently, that PageRank is only a tiny tiny element of the Gargyl site rating algorithm, and that we should not even think about it when working on SEO.

That's enough to make me want to consider it. Couple that with the fact that it is the only contributing factor to the algorithm that we can actually get a firm number for, and I'm glad if a site actually has PR.

[Slowdive]

A


We have a fair few sites with strong inbound links with good pr and authority but don't have much traffic and therefore make little cash, but we do get approaches for links from them so clearly they have some value.

That maybe the case and it may well be the sites still have extensive value, however one thing I would never do is base that valuation on what people will offer. I mean I have blogs that gets 700 spam submission link drops a day, that does not mean that its a good SEO tactic. So similarly the fact that some SEOS still think PR is important part of the linking algo does not make it fact or fiction. My point really is not to be objectionable but to point out that we need to monitor changes, tangible results and impact of actions. This entire market is too confused right now to take pointers from what others are doing, unless those others are Rand Fish or similar, but I am not seeing revelation from those camps of late either.

[cash ninja]

People do clearly value PR in some circles.

Actually, I was just on digital point looking at some of the sites for sale on there and noticed some (apparently) very cheap old sites/domains with PR2 - 4. Then I saw something very fishy, a domain registered yesterday that had PR3 - now that clearly can't be right which makes me then question how many of the other PRs are valid and if it's that easy to game PR then what value is it?

[grynge]

People do clearly value PR in some circles.

Actually, I was just on digital point looking at some of the sites for sale on there and noticed some (apparently) very cheap old sites/domains with PR2 - 4. Then I saw something very fishy, a domain registered yesterday that had PR3 - now that clearly can't be right which makes me then question how many of the other PRs are valid and if it's that easy to game PR then what value is it?

PR now only has value for noobs and old SEO experts that don't keep abreast of whats happening. You can have high pr sites with no traffic and no pr sites with 1000's of uniques per day. Even for linking I would suggest these days you go for sites that will pass through legit users to your site rather than pass through pr.