Watch Out For Fake PageRank (PR)

I frequent sitepoint’s marketplace (http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace) to look for good “deals” to buy. Recently I came across someone selling a PR4 domain here.

At the time of this writing the bid on that domain is $40, and you have to think that this is really too good to be true. So I went to my favorite PR checker tool here and it came back saying that it may be a fake PR.

Well, it probably is. Whoever owned the domain did a 301 redirect to http://blogoforum.com/ for a while just long enough for Google to give it the same PR as blogoforum.com, and then takes off the 301 redirect and parked it.

I raised this concern in the sales thread and got my comment deleted.

So the moral of the story is, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is (not all the time), and you should do your due diligence to make sure you get what you paid for.