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Faking Google Pankrank
By Mike Collins | May 6, 2008
Did you know that it’s possible to fake your Google Pagerank? This is something to keep in mind if you decide to buy or exchange links with another site. You may think you’re getting a PR 5 backlink when in fact it’s a PR 0!
The reason I know all this is that I recently asked a blogger to exchange links with one of my niche sites and he sent me an angry response accusing me of faking my PR 3 homepage. (I’m completely innocent by the way…up until this morning I didn’t even have the slightest clue HOW to fake PR). But after checking some of the online pagerank verifiers, it turns out some of them do show that I am faking PR. Not all of them though, some say my PR is legitimate.
I was pretty confused so I did some research and realized that I may have inadvertantly screwed myself by playing around with my htaccess file. Htaccess is a powerful file that can control passwords, redirects, and more. But it can really mess your site up if you’re not careful.
Anyway, I had added a line of code to redirect all visitors who go to http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com. It’s not really necessary but I like consistency and supposedly it helps having all incoming links point to one or the other. Well, I must done something wrong with set off alarms and made the verifiers think I was using some kind of shady redirect. At least that’s my best guess.
So I removed the redirect from my htaccess and we’ll see if that sets things straight. Could be a little while since my old page may still be in the cache.
In the meantime, here’s a great article I read on how to spot a site with fake PR.
How on Earth Do You Fake a PR (PageRank)?
By Urban Sotensek
Why would one want to have a fake pagerank? Google PageRank is a factor that determines a websites price. Usually the higher your pagerank is the more cash you can get for your website or advertising space on your website. Many webmasters are also buying pagerank for their website(s). A link to you on a website that has a pagerank of 8 will pass some juice to you and google’s robots will see this as a good vote for your website. Sometime later your web page may end up with a higher pagerank. The popular belief is that pagerank is all it takes to make your website more popular and thus appear in search results more often. While it is one factor to determine the positions of your web pages in search engines, it certainly is not the only and most important one. The recent google penalization of selling text links has cooled down matters a little bit, but websites with forged google pageranks still appear daily in the webmasters markets. Now that the reasons of why one should fake a page rank are known, we will look how this is done and how to avoid purchasing such websites or advertising on it.
SPOTTING A FAKE PAGERANK
There are two possible indicators that show google pagerank may not be valid. One is when a page shows pagerank in online tools but does not have any or very few backlinks in google. For example a website claims to have a pagerank of 7, but when you check it with the previously mentioned tool it shows no or very few backlinks (50 is very low for a website of PR7).
The Second possible scenario is when a domain is masked to redirect to a higher PR site. The masked page will temporarily gain the pagerank of the page it was masked to, even after the domain masking is taken down. All a person has to do in order to fake a pagerank is use a redirect for their domain and point it to a high pagerank domain. In the Google toolbar it will show the PR of the page it was pointed to.
DETECTING A FAKE PAGERANK
Detecting a fake PR is fairly simple. If you think that a site is showing a fake PR, then simply take a look at its cache version on Google. Make sure you check both instances, with and without the www prefix. One may be redirected, while the other not!
* Check cache by going to google and typing in info:yourdomain.com
* Check cache by going to google and typing in info:www.yourdomain.com
If you type the name of one domain, but results return a different domain, than this means an obvious sign of PR faking. To do that it is either doing a 301 / 302 redirect directly or with the use of cloaking. 301, 302, 200 are status codes which tell your browser what to do next.
* 301 - Permanent Redirect
* 302 - Temporary Redirect
* 200 - Connection Established and The Request Has Succeeded
To find out whether it is doing a 301 / 302 redirect directly or indirectly with cloaking, you have to look at its HTTP Header.
SUMMARY
So next time you buy a website, domain or advertising on a particular webpage, be sure to check out these indicators! If you are suspecting a faked pagerank, leave this website and search for another one.
Urban is an expert in fraud investigation, SEO, online marketing and business. This article is just an excerpt of [http://www.bustathief.com/2007/12/fake-pagerank-forged-google-rank.html]Fake Pagerank To read the detailed and full version go to [http://www.bustathief.com/2007/12/fake-pagerank-forged-google-rank.html]Forged Google Rank
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