Old SEO talk treated incoming links as “equity” you could pour from one URL to another. PageRank as a public number is dead; the folklore is not. Wikipedia’s summary of PageRank is enough history. For a domain investor, the danger is buying a string because a spreadsheet of backlinks looks fat, then discovering the name is on a blocklist or a UDRP target.
This URL stays. I’m Mostapha; I buy and sell names from Morocco. Link charts have talked me into leftovers. The letters go in the Domain Value Checker first. FAQ. DR is still not a price: that page.
When inherited links are a warning
Check whether the host is listed for spam. Spamhaus Domain Check is a better five seconds than a “DR 40 aged” pitch. Look up the registrant trail on DomainTools WHOIS if the history is messy. If the name collides with a brand, stop and read WIPO UDRP, also our trademark guide.
Welding those links onto a cleaner name with 301s is how you import dirt. Do not. Redirect chains, and URL farms already have their own pages. Extra spellings are not a link-graph strategy: two names, one business.
When links may stay in the story
You are buying a living site on the same topic as a clean history; you can prove control, and an end user would still want the name if every link vanished tomorrow. Then links are a site bonus. They are not a second-checker score. TLD still matters more than a blogroll from 2014; see IANA’s root database before you romanticise a cheap ccTLD with “great equity.”
End-user aftermarket buyers often want a push and a blank name. They will not pay you for a PBN. Value is the string.
Decision
- Checker: weak letters → ignore the link graph, do not bid.
- Spamhaus / WHOIS / WIPO: if any of those frown, the “equity” is the reason to walk.
- Only then, if you are actually running a site, may links be a time-saver, never the appraisal.
Keep the Google row. The architecture that belongs here now is name first, blocklists second, and link folklore last.