Mar 27th, 2007 by admin 4,035 Views
Recently i have written an article about Wordcloud sites and about the value of that kind of links. Word cloud links are usually advertised on Webmaster related forums and especially on DigitalPoint Forums in the link sales section. Word cloud links have a value, even it is not that big because those sites usually are not theme related to the site you are going to advertise on it; anyway you will get a back-link with a good PageRank and with the anchor text for the keyword you want to rank high in the search engine results.
When a webmaster comes on a Wordcloud site, the first thing that he checks is the PageRank, then the price and finally he has to decide to buy a link or not. Most of those sites use the same script and this script includes an image like this:
this image shows you that the PageRank for that site was validated trough a a script on SEOlogs.com that considers the PageRank valid and not fake. Many webmasters only have a quick look on those kind of sites, check the image, read that the PageRank was validated trough a script on SEOlogs.com and decide to buy one or even more. The problem is that the PageRank of many wordcloud sites is a FAKE! There are many PageRank validation tools out there (just try to Google this terms “Google PageRank validation”) but most of them are absolutely NOT reliable.
Take this guy as an example, he is advertising his wordcloud site on Digitalpoint.com and is selling the links for 1$. A first look on the domain of the websites reveals that the chosen domain has nothing to do with wordcloud links. Once you get on his page you will see this great and big image saying “VALID PAGERANK 4″ and after checking the price you will think “wow, i can buy a PageRank 4 link for 1$!!Great, let’s do this!”. The point is that in a case like this one, you bought a worthless link! Of course you spent only 1$ but what if you have spent maybe 20-30-40$ for a FAKE PageRank 6 link?
Now you will think “why are you saying that the PageRank shown by this great image is wrong?” The answer is very simple: try to use “link:” function in Google and to find some results for the given site. After you discovered that NO BACK-LINK to this website are cached in Google ( already this meens that the PageRank is fake; how can a website have a PageRank no site linking to it is cached in Google?). After this you can use the Yahoo Site Explorerto see if there are some back-links cached in Yahoo…in this case there aren’t.
So how did this guy manage to get a PageRank 4 domain that has no cached back-links in Google? Also this answer is quite simple: HE BOUGHT AN EXPIRED DOMAIN!
In fact if you go on Whois.net and check the domain that this guy is advertising, you will get these results:
He bought an expired domain the 24th of march, installed a wordcloud script on it and started to sell links on it the 27th of march! The page is showing a PageRank 4 because you should know that expired domains keep their PageRank until the next Google PageRank update but it is only a VISUAL PAGERANK! With the next Google update, if the page owner is not providing some new good back-links to his site, this will fall down to PageRank 0 because this is how Google works. Every time a domain changes owner, Google is erasing all PageRank data and back-link data of a given domain.
In the forum thread on Digitalpoint i mentioned above, I was the first how answered and who said that a link on that site was completely worthless. Do you know what happened? There were still some webmasters that bought a link on that site (even if only a few) because they only read the title “PR 4 links for 1$”, read the post of the thread starter and went on his site to buy a link without reading the opinion of other users in that thread…that is what i call blindness -_-’
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[…] 3) Before buying a link you will need to check the domain and make sure it is not an expired domain. This can be done thanks to whois.net. Checking the domain before buying a link is one of the most important things. In fact the PageRank of an expired domain is only a “virtual PageRank” and it will go down to 0 with the next Google PageRank update. Many people don’t know this yet and are buying links from people that bought a domain with virtual PageRank just some days ago. Read more about Fake PageRank […]
Actually, this article is a little misleading. Just because the domain was expired, and jsut becuase all of the backlinks have been reset, does not mean that there is no provided by a link from that site.
Google keeps track of backlinks and PR for a site seperatly. Although the backlinks for a site is often reset after a Google update, the PR is not, and links from that page will still provide some benifit to the linked site.
It’s pretty easy to. all you need is a new site with a link to it on an ‘expired domain’ with some PR but no backlinks. Then wait for the next PR update, and you’ll see that the ‘expired domain’ site transferred some of it’s PR to the new site. I’ve actually preformed this expirament a couple of times, and I’d be willing to bet you’d get the same result.
Hello,
thanks for your opinion. I have a list of a lot of Wordcloud sites, I will see what happens after the update and let you know. Anyway in my opinion PR from expired domains is not that useful…
Well, the thing is that the links: directive don’t tell you much. Invalid pagerank is found out by doing a info: and comparing the data with the domain name. Then you can tell if it is fake. I ran the website address through my fake detector and 702 google data centers show that it is a valid pagerank 4. I see how you can say it is not a valid pagerank, but when update rolls around it still will pass the pagerank onto the other sites that are linking to it. Like it or not this is not a bad way to get pagerank and pick up better search engine results.
Word cloud links have a value, even it is not that big because those sites usually are not theme related to the site you are going to advertise on it; anyway you will get a back-link with a good PageRank and with the anchor text for the keyword you want to rank high in the search engine results.
Hi,
i’ve stumbled over this post when i was googling to seek more info about expired domain. Anyway, as you said on your post:
“Every time a domain changes owner, Google is erasing all PageRank data and back-link data of a given domain.”
Recently i bought an expired domain(more than 1000 backlinks) with pr3 and predicted pr4 on the next update and my question is, will the domain be still on the same pr3 or it will drop to 0?
It will probably drop to 0 if you are not going to get some new inbound links. To keep it at PR3, all you need are a couple of backlinks from PR4 or PR5 websites
Hi again, Thanks for the respond… are you saying that buying expired domain with PR and thounsands of backlinks is just going to be a useless investment? well i wasn’t intend to keep the domain, i’m going to auction it on DP for a higher price.. do you thing it’s a good idea? I see so many DP members bargaining on this bussiness that’s why i want to try to see whether this a worthy investment.
Thanks again.
My personal opinion is that it’s a bad investment. Anyway on DP many members buy these domains and create a web directory or a wordcloud site and start to sell links on them. Many webmaster are going to buy those links because they don’t check if domain is an expired domain or and established domain. So you can definetly make some good money out of expired domains with pagerank…even if you are selling links to webmasters that don’t know that they are going to buy a worthless link…
Thanks for your feedback, i really appreciate that you have the time to respond… i’m still 50-50 on this matter anyway thanks for the advice.
[…] is it a real wordcloud site or was it built on an expired domain? […]
Check here the value of the text link and if the domain has a fake pagerank, i hope it helps!
http://www.scriptidea.net/linkappraisal
Even the big gurus are getting into this. Just today I have received an email from Shawn Casey http://www.shawncasey.com.
He is selling links from this site http://www.hotfilla.com. Clearly a fake PR.
Here is part of his email:
Besides being a PR6, this site has 1,685
backlinks so you know that the spiders are
crawling all over it and will get quickly
directed to any site that you add...
[…] didn’t quit my journey on seeking the used domain, until I found this blog, it belong to linkrain, a member of digitalpoint forum. I read their post, and although I […]