Beware of domains selling on Ebay with high page rank – chance are the domain has a Fake Page Rank.

Check out this one on Ebay – Completely Fake – Yet it will get high bids and Ebay never ends them if you complain. Fake PR Auction Ebay Click Here.

http://www.4candlesuk.com does not match Google’s record of the URL. Reasons for this maybe a few reasons including, the URL is fake or the URL has been redirected.

Domains are big business these days, and Pagerank fraud is becoming a serious problem. When someone is offering a domain name for sale, they can artificially inflate the domain’s PR. It is achieved when offending domains use a 301 or 302 redirects that point their sites to sites with a high Pagerank. This is a well known trick in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, but people who aren’t familiar with SEO are most likely to fall for this.\

Domain names are investments, and any investment should researched. Never make the assumption that the domain broker has done this research for you. Chances are, they haven’t.
Just as there is fraud in PPC, there is fraud in domain purchasing as well. Remember that. Just because the toolbar says a PageRank 5 doesn’t mean it is.

Verify the PageRank is legit. In the domain buying space, PageRank is often faked – especially on eBay or other auctions. I have been a victim of this in the past.

So, how can you protect yourself? Easy. You can use a free tool over at SEO Logs. Just type in the domain and it will check. If it comes back and verifies that it is valid, are you safe? Not quite. One more check.

Use the PageRank Predictor from iWebTool. It will give you a prediction based on current link counts from MSN. You should also check Yahoo!’s Site Explorer. These are two great resources because they update their links on a weekly basis, whereas Google updates theirs about once a quarter.