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Forget about the PageRank for a moment; it’s probably not your primary concern.
To greatly (very greatly) simplify things, the bulk of a web document’s ranking strength comes from the relationship between the words on that document and the anchor text from links that point to that document, both on and off the document’s domain, mostly off.
If you change the content on this domain you will break the relationship between the domain and the links pointing to the domain whenever you delete a document. You also risk breaking the consistency between the anchor text of inbound links and your on-domain documents by rewriting those documents that you do not delete. In other words, you will be pressing the reset button and beginning to earn high rankings from a greatly reduced position of strength.
Obviously there are things you can do to mitigate this: preserve original content preserve document addresses, maintain keyword consistency in new documents and use .htaccess to point deleted documents to new documents. If you are building a site for traffic you need to consider this and plan accordingly via content and SEO plans.
PageRank is not the all-important or dominant factor it once was and currently represents only a small part of Google’s ranking algorithms. Also, realize that visible PageRank does not equal real PageRank. Like the SERPs themselves, PageRank is constantly updated. Visible PageRank represents a snapshot from the past, not the reality of the present.
If you hope to parley the PageRank into selling links, then you should realize that link brokers and buyers are fast becoming more savvy, looking beyond PR and at more pertinent indicators such as keyword/SERP relationships and documented traffic levels.
Before you buy this website make sure that the keywords in the existing content and in the domain’s inbound links are consistent with the content you wish to install. This, not PageRank, will tell you if you and the domain are a good match.
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