How much is Page Rank really worth?

[absoauto]

We are in a position to purchase a domain, made of relevant keywords to our company with a current page ranking of 4 for their home page. However in looking at their analytics and other information they do not do well on significant keywords and have very low site traffic. In fact they do very, very poorly.

With their high page ranking would it be relatively easy to conduct a successful SEO campaign on the domain if we were to take it over as our own and attempt to climb in the SERP's? I know Page Rank doesn't mean everything when it comes to your ranking, but 4 is relatively high in our field, so I don't really understand why they do so poorly when it comes to their actual rankings on key words.

[EGOL]

Maybe they were hit by Panda or Penguin or another penalty.

Lots of sites have been hit in the past couple of years.

I would have the site reviewed by someone who knows a lot about those types of penalties if you are going to pay serious money for the domain.

And... lots of sites have PR that drop after the domain is sold and the former owner takes down his links.

[Chris.Menke]

First thing I'd do is look at their traffic history if possible.  Look as far back as you can and see if there are significant drops in traffic. It would be a good sign if there were not any significant drops.  If the terms they're getting their most traffic for now were the same terms they were getting their most traffic for two or three years ago--and they rank down on page 2 or 3,  it could be a sign of fixable under optimization.

If, however, you don't see any significant drops and you examine a page (maybe their homepage) and it looks appropriately optimized for appropriately competitive terms but the page is not showing up anywhere in the results, I'd hesitate.  There could be a penalty far back in it's history that you're not able to see.

Take a look at the wayback machine and see what the site looked like prior to the analytics history you're able  to view.  Was it the same site? Maybe the people you're buying it from bought it from someone else who'd spammed and jammed it. If that were the case, maybe a simple reinclusion request could fix the problem--if there is one.

There are a lot of possibilities and they're all worth looking into.  Of course, the smart buyer might do exhaustive research, keep the results close to their vest, and push the seller hard on the lack of traffic issue to suppress the price.

[TakeshiYoung]

Definitely use a tool like OSE or Majestic to take a look at their link profile. Where are their high authority links coming from? Are they hard to duplicate links, or something you could get yourself? Are they links that could be removed once the site is sold? Are there any spammy or blackhat links?

Make sure you do a thorough analysis of the site's backlinks to make sure you're not getting a lemon. Also, PageRank can sometimes drop when a site is sold to a new owner, so be aware of that possibility, especially if you are going to be changing the site's content a lot.