For a couple of days, I’ve gotten many emails from people trying to sell me text links on sites with high Page Ranks (PR). Having links into your site from popular sites that also have lots of links coming into them is probably the most important factor for getting good search engine listings. Page Rank system from Google is a rough measure on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the relevance & content of the page and the number & quality of the link leading to it from other sites.

PageRank Explained: (Source: http://www.google.com/technology/)

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Beside e-mails, there are many auctions at eBay selling domains with high Page Ranks. Fake Page Rank domains are becoming more common each day. Many inexperienced users purchase domain names that have fake Page Rank at eBay. If you haven’t seen the problem, you may check this search. 

So how do they fake Page Rank?

It is simple to fake a page rank of a site. Faking a site’s page rank is achieved by implementing a script which detects if a user to the site is Googlebot (Google’s spider/crawler that finds and indexes web pages). If Googlebot is visiting the site, the script will redirect Googlebot to a site with high Page Rank. For example, if they direct Googlebot to google.com, the page rank will be 10.

Then how can we detect fake Page Rank?

Fortunately, in a few easy steps, you can detect fake page rank.

• Check the domain with fake PR checkers like SEOlogs, CheckPageRank, or RankAlert. Do not use standard PR tools or the Google toolbar.
• Type the domain into Google (domainname.com) and if another domain comes up in the first result, then the page is being redirected and domainname.com is fake.
• Check backlinks manually by typing link:www.domainname.com. Go to each site listed, if there is any, and search for the link to www.domainname.com. If you find a site with a link on it, record its PageRank. This procedure is very important since “Fake PageRank Detection Tools” do not check for this.
• If you’re using eBay, make sure to check out the person’s feedback and past auctions. 

I have checked plenty of domains and almost every domain that is for sale with PR does not have any backlinks. According to above mentioned PageRank algorithm, it is impossible to have high PageRanks without quality backlinks. 

Beside Page Rank validity, getting links from other web sites just because these web sites have high Page Ranks, does not make much sense if a web page is not related to your site. It is always better to get links from sites that are related to yours. These links will increase your search engine rankings and you’ll get targeted visitors from these sites. Focus on web users instead of search engines.

Add comment