Do Expired Domain Retain Their Page Rank ?

[RishiSeo]

I am a little bit confused about buying expired Domain Names because i have got mixed advice over the internet.

Some Say That They Lose Their Page Rank And Some Say That They Don't. So I would really love to hear what PRO Members have to say about it!

Also is it a Good Idea to use Expired Domain names for Link Building ?

Rishi

[scanlin]

It's a question of whether they still have the external links pointing to them, and how you handle those references. If you correctly 301 redirect all those old inbound links (which may point to subpages that no longer exist) then you will still get the link juice. If, however, all those inbound links result in 404 errors then you will not get the link juice from them.

If you buy an old domain where all the existing exeternal links point to the root then you should be good on the link juice. But if you have a situation where you're buying an old domain that had deep links (from the outside) that you're not going to maintain then you could lose a lot of juice.

Also, keep in mind that PR hasn't been updated in a long time. Impossible to know what it's current value us (mozRank is more up to date than Google toolbar PR).

[AlanBleiweiss]

Mike's suggestion about understanding what the current value is for that site and all it's individual pages.  If there had been significant value at one time and it's dropped off, you'll need to rebuild it all over again.  Also, if you're buying old domains and replacing the content with all different content, you're essentially starting from scratch. Domain names by themselves won't provide enough value to make it worthwhile without all that new from-scratch work, and just using them for redirects is definitely not a quality SEO tactic in 2011.