What are the benefits of purchasing an established domain name? People are advertising "Valid, undropped domain since 1999" and "PR6" domains. Could someone people explain this to a designer that is just getting into the technical side? Thanks
If you would not like to join the community of people who are mad after PR, I suggest you stay away. Its worthless and you will end up loosing your money. In depth, since google introduced a new concept of PR (pagerank), people like mad have started running after it. They try to get the PR of their website to as high and then sell that domain. But the buyers don't realise that PR is not a important factory in search engine rankings. Google has become a registrar so that they have a official access to the whois database. The reason behind all this was that they people used to sell 5 or 10 years old domains at high costs because domain age is considered as a ranking factor. Apart from that, they also used to sell domains with high PR. But google is smart. Their system now checks the registrant history and accordingly gives rankings to the websites. So my friend, stay away from all this. Its not gonna help you. Instead, develop your own domain and website, follow ethical SEO practices and you will automatically see your website getting top rankings.
You can buy a domain name with PR6, but at the next Google update as soon as they detect that domain is no longer relevant it is going to drop. And if the sites linking to you are all selling oranges and your site is abour lemons, any traffic you get from them will be useseless, plus the content will also affect your rankings, so having 100 incoming links from oranges sites to your lemon sites will make you rank high in oranges at best and confuse the search engine at worst. I say, this is all bullshit and good business for the domainers.
To be fair I barely understood the above advice and I have been doing this for years! Dont let technical jargon put you off. The benefits of buying an established domain are that it will rank better and faster in the search engines. It is a common practice.