Thinking about grabbing an expired domain, however my question is how long before google adjusts the page rank. I have heard people saying that Pr will go to 0 but what happens if the registrant name is kept same, will google still penalize me?
PR is related to link to that page not the content itself. But I doubt it will go back to low PR if your site is not active enough. In otherwise, the inbound link may be of no much weight to your site since you have different content or your site is not related to the inbound link
There really is no clear cut answer on this unfortunately. In my experience in the PR for the domain remains but the links pointing to the domain seem to lose all of their value. I have two domains in particular (one actually dropped and the other was picked up through SnapNames) and both maintained their PR5 value (for well over a year now) along with their listed backlinks, but are outranked by scrapper sites that copied my unique content word for word. If you are working on a quick hit MFA type site then going for an expired domain may be a worthwhile gamble, but if you are looking to develop a long-term and stable site then I would suggest that using an expired domain to get a headstart is not worth the gamble or the potential long-term headaches.
In some cases the PR goes to zero in some cases not... Only the big G knows why ... I bought a expired domain last summer it still has a PR6 Some others are PR0
Google changes PR because backlinks start to vanish. When webmasters see that now contents are not the same for which they linked they remove link. But you will not fall direct to 0 in some cases. If you build similar contents then you can retain PR
Keep the theme of the site the same or if it has to change, change it gradually, some pages at a time. And hope to be lucky.
I regged some domains with PR in the past, and what I did was easy. You have to get more backlinks to keep the PR. Social Bookmarking was ok for me, you have also to get some PR links... PR will be not necessary 0, you have to work in the domain.
My personal decision is that the expiring domains should have at least one backlink in MSN + Yahoo + Google.
The PR is based only on incoming links, so unless they change - the PR won't change. If you change the content of your site it is quite likely that: 1) You will lose links as your linkers see it is no longer relevant 2) Remaining links will lose some value as they are likely no longer relevant
pr is related with backlinks . if that site did not loose the backlinks , pr will stay the same value
A good trick I used is to look at the wayback machine for a link exchange page on that expired domain. If I found one I copy the links from there and put them on a link page and used the exact filename. I think often webmasters check their backlinks with automated software or manual with some free services online and remove non existing links ... maybe some of your inbounds stay longer with this technique