what are the risks when buying a domain?

[deep_blue]

since I have no clue (just the normal webmaster knowledge I guess) when it comes to buy an old domain with pr I wonder what kind of risks are involved here (other than the obvious e.g getting betrayed etc.)
Can somebody point me to some information/articles etc
thanks in advance!

[Head Boy]

Originally Posted by deep_blue

since I have no clue (just the normal webmaster knowledge I guess) when it comes to buy an old domain with pr I wonder what kind of risks are involved here (other than the obvious e.g getting betrayed etc.)
Can somebody point me to some information/articles etc
thanks in advance!

I'd forget about PR - the ranking that everybody talks about isn't the one used by Google. You should remember that it stands for "page rank" and not "domain rank" as well. So what are the risk in buying a domain with the site (I assume that's what you mean as page rank is meaningless without pages).

You can check fairly easily that it isn't banned on Google, or blocked as a spammer's name.

It is harder to check that the traffic hasn't been bought and pushed to the name, or that it's based on links from the sellers other sites, which will be removed on completion of the sale. Type the domain name including extension into Google, and see what inbound links it throws up.

If the name was transferred within the last 60 days, and you will need to push it to get ownership, then make sure that the name wasn't stolen.

If you feel that the seller doesn't own the name, then you can use an escrow service for the transfer, or you can ask the seller to change a name in the registration details to confirm he has access.

Look up the history of the domain in the archives, and if it's history isn't consistent with the traffic, then ask the seller to explain.

There are a load more potential pitfalls, and "caveat emptor" applies as always