Beware Link Sales Scams

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I’ve been perusing some webmaster forums that have links for sale, and I’m noticing quite a few scams. The main scam appears to be the purchasing of expired domains and then selling links from the website based on Toolbar PR.

The trouble with this is obvious. Google keeps the PR 90 days out of date on the PR, so the numbers you’re looking at are the old PR totals that went to the old website, before it changed hands. If you purchase a link from a website like this, you’ll end up holding the bag on the next PR update, when the site loses its’ PR and you don’t get any despite your purchase.

How can you tell a website is an expired domain that is being re-cycled? There’s actually quite a few tell-tale signs:

• The whois date. If the domain was registered within the last 90 days, it does not have any PageRank. It means that the PageRank is essentially fake and won’t be there on the next update. You’ll see this a lot with “Bidding directories”, especially ones that offer links below market price.
• The internal pages of the site are all PR 0 yet the document root has a high PR. Again, this could mean the website is new, or new pages were installed on an expired domain. Check the whois to make sure.

The main thing to do is do a “reality check”, especially when the prices appear to be too good to be true. If you want to see if a site has changed, make sure to look at The Wayback Machine to see the history. That should shed some light on the subject for you.

Here’s a new Link sales forum you can check out if you’re interested.

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