Buying high PR expired domains? See this to avoid Fake PRs!

Ok, so I have been reading about buying expired domain names with PRs for the last few days, since I wanted to buy a few and use them with a few blog networks that you can submit high pr sites of your own in order to submit articles for free.
And for some reason the topic of buying high PR expired domain names is being talked about a lot on the forum lately and I red a few thread where a few warriors fell for expired domains with fake high page rank.

So, I started to do some research to find out how to protect myself from buying one of those faked PR expired domains. And I found a few tings that may help those who are beginner in this filed and do not how exactly to spot fake prs. Here is the easiest way I found to find fake prs.

This is how fake PRing (for lack of a better term) works.

Website 1 has no PR or low PR
Website2 has a high PR

I want to fake PR for website1 in order to fool you into buying it from me. I simply steal PR from website2. How?... I do either a 301 / 302 redirect directly or I use cloaking in order to get the PR from website2 to show up with my site (website1) when you check for PR.


How to spot fake PR?
From my brief search I found a few tools, but the easiest and I would think most reliable way for most beginners is the following:

In Google type: info:domainname.com (replace domianname.com with the domain suspected of having fake PR).

You get something like the following image (I tested an actual site(nmfilmmuseum.org)that is being sold on goddady auction and the site claims it has PR6, and indeed when you check with any PR checker, it shows up as a PR6 site.)





In my example you see that nmfilmmuseum.org is faking its PR. Its basically stealing PR by using a redirect from a legitmiate PR6 website newmexicoculture.org.

Real PR6 belongs to newmexicoculture.org and nmfilmmuseum.org is not a PR6 site.


Also, another thing I red is that many times when you buy an expired domain name, the pr disappears after a few weeks and some people had suggested thats because if the old content are off the site now, Google will not count all the backlinks they had pointing to them before since ether is no actually content page on the site anymore.

Using the method above you can actually see the old cached versions of the site when it was alive with all its content by clicking the "Google cache"link (see image), so you can at least re-create its actual URLs and then add your own related content or you could content the old owner and buy ask permission to use (buy from him or whatever) his old content.

Also, Do not rely on page rank checker tools, because some of them actually do fall for the trick themselves.



Now, please remember, I am not an expert, I just found these information while researching and to me it seems like a simple and quick way to check for fake pr and be certain of the results.

I would apprcite it if other experienced warriors would share their tips and tricks or perhaps correct me if I am wrong here or have over looked an important factor or what have you.

Any way, I just thought with the recent high pr expired domain craze, this would be helpful to lots of interested people. Be careful out there and good luck.