PR Useless? And Flippa.com: Close Enough

Why You May Want To Read This

• If you are like me and have no clue about website flipping 
• If you want to join me in not knowing anything about website flipping :)
• Is Page Rank useless?

A few weeks ago, I tried analyzing one particular website auction taking place on Flippa. I guesstimated that the price for that site (uneasysilence.com) would fetch about $4,000 to $6,000 USD.

I was wrong by $2000.

It sold for $8,000.

Danny on Google+

Why Observe This Particular Site?

• To see how it progresses and to see what happens. This could prepare me to make informed decisions regarding future purchases. I intend to analyze other websites to also see their performances later on. 

Now that uneasysilence.com is sold, I'm going to observe any changes that could happen to it as the new owner refurbishes it.

Note:

• Uneasysilence.com gets regularly linked to by a website called techmeme.com which is basically a news aggregate of sorts or a glorified link farm - depending on your perspective.

If indeed uneasysilence generates monthly revenues of $1,500 USD a month, it would be very interesting to find out whether the new owner would still get the same level of performance as the previous owner has.

As of September 21, 2011. No obvious changes have been observed.

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High PR Useless?

It would seem so after I discovered an auction on Flippa.com for a blog/website called provit.net. As I was analyzing the website, I discovered that it has an abnormally high Page Rank of 7.

For perspective, Mashable.com has PR8.

History
Bingo! I think I may have found the reason for the high PR. Searching for provit.net on webarchive, I discovered that it was once the home to a tech company named Fraunhofer with the description:

"Digital Product Development with Virtually Cooperating Teams Using Optical Networks"

2001

Discrepancy
At the time of listing the site looked like this:

Figure 1

This is a thumbnail and I wasn't able to take a screenshot of the original. But I read about it and it was a health website. Then an hour later it changed to this:

Figure 2

A Wordpress hosted blog that has been hastily put up. Ahhhhh, now I get it.

You can beat Google, but you can't beat WebArchive.
I suppose what happened is simple. Fraunhofer owned the domain from 2001 up to 2010. Somewhere along the road, it decided to redirect the domain to its new website which has a suffix of .de.

By 2010, it let go of the domain provit.net. Hence, the new guy selling the domain and the blog then picked up the expired domain and decided to put a health blog. He then decides to capitalize upon the High PR and upon realization that the people participating in the auction saw what happened, he changed the content to the latest iteration seen in Figure 2.

Conclusion

1. The Page Rank for the domain will most likely fall since the content and ownership of the blog has just recently changed. This would also be true if the content will change. 
2. If you purchased this site, thinking that you got a High PR website, then you may be in for a surprise  the next time Google updates its PR. 
3. In this regard, PR is not totally useless as Fraunhofer is a legitimate German tech company. 
4. Before purchasing websites with claimed High PR Rankings, check the history and whether it has recently changed ownership. 
5. When in doubt use webarchive to verify.