Protecting yourself when buying a website – PageRank

This is part of a series I’m writing about safety in website purchasing.  As the market grows, so will fraud.  When I started buying and selling websites, I pretty much knew everyone in marketplaces like Sitepoint.  Now, there are so many people jumping into the market every day, it’s impossible for me to keep track of who’s a player and who’s a scammer.

You’ll often see PageRank listed as a key feature of a website.  Particularly, when the index page, or other pages on the site are showing a PageRank of six or higher in the toolbar.  This can influence how much people will pay for a website.  This is particularly so when a significant portion of a website’s revenue comes from selling text link ads.

How can we verify whether the PageRank is solid?  Well, in most cases, fake PageRank is easily discovered.  The first thing you want to do is go into Yahoo! Site Explorer and see where a site’s backlinks are.   Type in the site url, and click ‘Explore URL’ and have a look through the results.  Use the url for my blog as an example, http://www.petertdavis.net
The first thing you’ll see is what pages Site Explorer recognizes on the site.  Just verify that this is in line with your expectations for the site.  My blog shows just over 800 pages, and that’s pretty much what I’d expect.  Then, click the ‘Inlinks’ and see what that lists.  You’ll notice it gives a number, which is how many backlinks Site Explorer thinks the site has.  What that means is, any page on any website that contains a link to any page on the site you’re examining.

Is the number of Inlinks Site Explorer shows in the range you expected?  If you’re looking at a site being sold as a PageRank 7, and Site Explorer shows a dozen or less Inlinks, that should throw up a red flag.  This blog shows over ten thousand Inlinks, and that would be a strong indicator that the PageRank of this domain is solid.

In addition to looking at the raw number of Inlinks, next you’d browse through to see the diversity of the Inlinks.  Are they all coming from a small group of domains, or are there many different domains?  You want to make sure that the links are diversified, and not all coming from websites that the seller controls.  It’s a common trick that all of the PageRank is coming from the sellers own website, and if you have no guarantee that those links will remain in place, you can expect to see a drop in PageRank very soon.  I call this “Inbred PageRank.”
More serious than Inbred PageRank is hijacked PageRank.  This doesn’t happen so much anymore, but during 2005 and 2006, I saw dozens of examples of a supposed high-PageRank site being sold, but the PageRank was hijacked from another domain.  I won’t explain how it’s done, that’s easy enough to find out, but I’ll explain how to detect it.

What you need to do is start going to the sites listed in the Inlinks list, and verify that the link actually exists.  Under normal conditions, you will find pages in the Inlinks list that no longer have the link.  This is normal.  Expect it.  However, if you can’t find the link on any of the pages, that’s bad.

The more you’re investing in a site, the more of the Inlinks list you want to examine.  You can discover some interesting things.  Perhaps there is a single large source of PageRank, and all the others are minor.  You’ll know that your PageRank is heavily dependent on a single source.  That’s a risk you need to know about when you’re buying a site.  What you hope to find is a diversity of types of sites and strength of PageRank in the Inlinks.  You don’t want to find that only, or primarily the Inlinks are from directories.  You want to see links from content and resource pages as well.

This should give you a primer on what to look for when the site you’re buying includes an attractive PageRank.  Even when you’re buying a lower PageRank site, you may want to give a look at the Inlinks in Site Explorer.  It does give you an insight into what type of marketing the owner has done for the website.  Good luck!