I heard people say Google PageRank (PR) is not reliable anymore.. cannot be trusted? i'm planning to buy aging domain WITH PR but I found the price is quite high. Should I ignore the PR and buy cheaper aging domain?
Ignore the PR and look at back links, age, has it had any issues in the past with adsense etc and how well does it fit with your business plan?
PR isn't going to be updated for the rest of the year. When it comes back, we'll see whether or not it has more meaning.
Like Alexa, it won't. The only real use of (high) PR is if you sell links to newbies - otherwise you're just wasting your time playing around with it. I have plenty of sites with 0/NA-2 PR ranking number one in Google, and that's what matters - not some irrelevant number. I know PR and actual ranking go more or less hand-in-hand, but one shouldn't obsess over it.
Right - just check the backlinks. Make sure the site wasn't spammed by the previous owner, and make sure the page rank is not fake.
The PageRank is now under a modification process, Google wants to change a bit the way of achieving the Rank therefore for 2013 will be no changes. For you if you really want to buy a domain in these days the most important factor is the number of the quality backlinks that this website is having. The age is not so important because I saw very old pages with ZERO visibility because of the lack of promotion. So try one of the SEO tools to see the backlinks and as well check their quality after that you may take a decision. If there is a functional website with revenue on it then just calculate the average monthly revenue X 12 and you'll get a close figure to what you should pay for a domain.
Dropped domains have a different story, still you do have to check their history, bounce evolution and all what you can find from the past of that domain. Anyway, I never bought a dropped domain, I don't like surprises
Dropped domains are indeed a little trickier as you need a more thorough research. You are not only looking for past links now, but also for previous reputation any potential ghosts from the past that can haunt you in the future. You can try and check a tool, for example The Wayback Machine, to see the history of the domain since its initial registration and get a better idea of what you're getting into
There is another ranking Domain Authority (DA). Check DA at opensiteexplorer. So forget Google Pagerank(PR).