Buying pre-owned domains can be an excellent choice for a domain speculator or for someone looking to start a new online business. This is because pre-owned domains are likely to have some degree of traffic already built up by the previous owner; they've begun your marketing campaign for you!

However, sometimes domain sellers try to hike the value of their domain by claiming to be selling a domain which has a high Google PageRank. Google calculates PageRank by assessing the "importance" of a website based on link popularity – that is, the number and quality of incoming links to that website. A site with many links from external pages with content which is relevant to that site will have a higher page rank than a website with few incoming links from general "link farm" pages.

Certainly PageRank is a useful thing: not only does it boost the position of your website in search engine results, but you can contribute to bestowing higher PageRanks on other websites by putting links from your high PageRank site to these other pages. More "important" sites confer more PageRank points to the websites to which they link.

There are many domain names for sale on websites like eBay which claim to have a high PageRank. While this looks like it could save you a lot of work, usually, such offers are a bit of a scam. Here's why:

- No one can guarantee that, once you put your new domain name to whatever use, the PageRank will stay the same. For example, supposing you buy "paperchains.com" to use for your paper party decorations website. It could have reached its high PageRank before by being pointed at a website which sold journalists' services to magazines and newspapers. This would mean that the incoming links to your website would be from websites about journalism – not about party decorations.

- Unscrupulous sellers have ways and means of faking PageRank. Without going into details about how this might be done, it's worth making sure you check the PageRank of pages using both Google Toolbar and an independent PageRank checker.

- Having a website with a high PageRank doesn't necessarily mean that you can just link to all your other websites and boost their PageRank too. This is because relevance of incoming links is important as well as the PageRank of the referring site. If you link from your party decorations site to a site about eye infections in budgerigars, it's unlikely to boost its PageRank much.

- One link from a site with a high PageRank is a drop in the ocean. If you really want to improve the search engine ranking of your website, you need to work on getting highly relevant links from a variety of important websites, as well as employing other standard search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, including adding frequently updated, unique, keyword-rich content to your site. This takes time and effort. There are no quick SEO fixes!

By Brian Jackson