Found a blog with PR5 that someone just let go. Went ahead and registered it. All DCs are showing PR5, but toolbar is showing blank, not 0. A lot of the backlinks come into pages on the blog that are no longer there and thus 404, but the majority come back to the blog main page. Is there a way to redirect all the 404's to the main page. Would I need to manually create all of those pages and redirect to the main blog page. Trying to preserve the PR for this blog. Is it a lost cause? Just wondering. Hasn't cost anything...yet.
You would need to create each page and do a 301. One thing though. If the SE's find out the domain had been expired, then re-purchased by a new owner it may to worse then if you just registered a fresh domain. I've read articles about this where people have had terrible rankings and they never improved. I can't say if it's true or not... but from what I know I'd rather start with a fresh domain.
I think alot of it might depend on how long it has been offline. If it didn't go down long enough for someone like google to notice, you might be ok.