Expired Domains Hold Pr, while they have backlinks intact Options

[Mong]

So far i believed that expired domains loose their PR value and get PR0 after deletion from registry. Even if they have backlinks intact ... but Google doesn't value them. {according to GG from WMW}

But today i was chatting with my friend and we started to talk about expired domains thing ...

He was of the point that if you put relevant {related to old site} content and do nothing your PR will come back. He said he got PR back in past in this way. Though i am not sure how it happened????

But he also gave me one url to prove that Google has some glitches in feature that handles expired domains thing... for adding points to his opinion he shown me this url which was PR7 before deletion but got PR6(in 28th April 2007 pr update) {not PR0} after deletion.

So what to believe?

What's your opinion?

Thank You.

[JohnMu]

What if your own domain accidentally expires and you get it back? What if your domain is with a registry that Google does not have all updates for (eg not .com)? Google would have to poll the registry every day (or crawl?) just to see if it was expired. That seems like a waste of resources to me. Additionally, site ownership in the whois data can change even if the site is still the "same".

How much would a site have to change to be recognized as something different? Could this happen in a legitimate redesign?

John

[Mong]

John, you have asked me more complicated questions. ;=)

[JohnMu]

Sometimes more questions can help find an answer

What I was getting at with the first part of those questions is that Google can only monitor the .com domain space to recognize expired domains, and even then, it can't be certain that they were sold to someone else afterwards. Even without an expired domain, a lot of things can happen to theoretically make the old links irrelevant to the new content. All in all, it's nearly impossible for Google to use "this domain was expired for a certain time" as a signal to ignore all existing links for pagerank and ranking purposes. With that in mind, it would be logical that domains that were expired (even for a longer time) would still carry the same toolbar pagerank as before.

Assuming, of course, that the links still exist.

I think that last part is important: if a domain has been expired for a year, you can assume that a lot of the links pointing to it will have been removed in that time (depending on the niche, of course, some are quick, some are really slow). It could easily be that you can buy a year-old, expired domain with PR4, and then with the next pagerank update you finally see the link-removal reflected in terms of toolbar pagerank. If you had waited a month before buying it, it would have lost pagerank even earlier.

John

[bwelford]

Perhaps I'm not understanding, but if the domain is expired then presumably there is nothing to be found at that domain: no home page, no robots.txt file. So wouldn't that mean that the domain no longer exists in Google's database after the Google spider finds it's not there say two or three times in a row.

[bragadocchio]

We don't know for certain how the search engines handle expired domains.

There are a few different reasons why a domain might expire, from mistake to change of address to sale of the site.

If links to the pages of the site still exist, it's likely that Google will try to follow them.

If a new site replaces the old one (redesign or transfer of ownership), and the content of the site is a decent match for the anchor text, it's possible that Google will continue to pass along link equity, even if the site was down for a while.

[lovekills_s]

Hi Guys..

I have 5+ expired domains, they still have PR, and its been one year for 3 of them, for the others they are 5 months old.

If content remains somewhat similar and URL`s of the inner pages remain the same, PR can be maintained, but that too when the registry changes within one month of domain parking, or it will move out gradually..

Regards
LKS

[SportsGuy]

I have 5+ expired domains, they still have PR, and its been one year for 3 of them, for the others they are 5 months old.

If content remains somewhat similar and URL`s of the inner pages remain the same, PR can be maintained, but that too when the registry changes within one month of domain parking, or it will move out gradually..

Regards
LKS

Bingo - I was going to post pretty much the exact same response.

keep the topic related. By doing this, the inbound links are still related, so ares till deemed "on topic".

Also, a lot of older sites have pages indexed in the Wayback machine, so finding the original content is often very easy. great place to look to get a clue about the original topic of a domain.

One word of warning - don't go too crazy buying expired domains. You really do need to be able to set up a site again, keep it updated and so on, or the domain just kind of dries up and that PR rank you essentially bought starts to dry up as well. (It's not an immediate thing, but over time, it'll slowly degrade as the site ages with no appreciable growth or changes.)