Here is the scenario xyz.com existed for a few years, then for the last year it was a one page portal with hundreds of orphan pages. We redesigned the site and added content so now it has about 15 pages of really good content. When I joined the company they didn't tell me about the old site. I search the URL for PR and I get about 19 pages that have a PR5 that are totally orphaned. These pages are currently returning a 404 and being redirect to the homepage. So I tell my guys to 301 these pages (from .htaccess) to our new content pages, which is very similar to the old content. When I do a site:http://www.xyz.com the only site pages that come up in Google are the new pages., because of my sitemap.xml submit.xml. But the old pages are still showing PR when search for using PR tools. I took down the sitemap.xml and resubmitted with these orphaned pages, and then will be doing the 301. Will this work? Am I too late to capture those high PR pages?
If the backlinks pointing to the old pages is still exists then their pagerank value is still there and you can pass it to the domain using redirection, other wise you lost it.
Do you have any real basis for this? If the back links stay the same meriting a PR5 why would Google reset anything? You're saying that if the registration/whois info changes Google discounts all back links?! Sorry but I'm calling BS.
Hello, Google NOT reset Page Rank when the domain is dropped, if the domain keep the backlinks This is my experience. Jakomo