Hi, I was thinking about buying a website which is for sale. The website is in the same market to my own and I would only want to buy it for the backlinks it already has. Now if I bought the website but only kept the domain and used web forwarding as opposed to a 301 redirect to my site, would this pass on links and pagerank to my site? I only ask as I don't particularly want to buy this website and pay the costs of hosting it, I just want the domain and benefit by redirecting the links onto my own site.
By web forwarding do you mean meta refresh? That won't pass pagerank to your site. I normally buy the website and put a link on it for my website. All depends on the price you have to pay for the domain. Remove other outgoing links on the website and only keep one link (pointing to your website).
Well it would have been the web forwarding that 123-reg.co.uk offer, but I have looked into it further and it would appear they use 302 redirects and after reading this article, http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/3463.htm I think it will just be best to transfer the domain to my own hosting provider and do a 301 redirect.
buying that website and use is for 3 way link exchange like link the people in your theme from that site and ask them to place your other site link that will make it one way link to your site and a good pr juice.