Forging Google Pagerank
Anyone who owns a website and is even remotely aware of where their site shows up in the major search engines knows what Google’s page rank is. Page rank in a nutshell is how valuable Google has deemed your website to be. The thinking goes that if high page rank sites are linking to you concerning a certain topic then you must be somewhat of an authority on that subject. Though no one has the secret formula of Google’s search algorithm, it is a pretty commonly held belief in the search engine optimization community that the higher your page rank, the bigger boost Google is going to afford you in their listings.
Now it shouldn’t surprise you that where their is a system in place, there will be unscrupulous individuals out there trying to find the loopholes to allow them to exploit it for their own means. Case in point, there are always a hand full of page rank 1-6 domains for sale on eBay. While those 5 & 6 domains can be quite valuable, you need to be on the lookout for forged pagerank. How would someone forge a page rank you ask? Pretty simply actually. All you would have to do is add a 301 or a 302 redirect to a website with a high page rank and during Google’s next page rank update cycle, your site would mirror, or be slightly less than, the page rank of the site you were pointing to. Google is basically inferring that the sending site is the same as the landing site.
I see a few lightbulbs going off in people’s heads. Don’t mistake this as a quick page rank fix for your site. Once that redirect comes off your site, the page rank disappears as well. So while it may say your page rank is temporarily high, it will be wiped away the next time Google does a page rank update. Google tends to do these once a quarter so just because it looks high at the moment doesn’t mean you won’t be back at square one next month. Also if Google catches you doing this, they can remove you entirely from the search engine for breaking their TOS policies. The dreaded Google ban is never a fun thing to encounter.
So the question becomes, how do you identify these shady sites from the ones with true page rank. Your first avenue is Google itself. Check both info:www.domainname.com and info:domainname.com to see if the site in question actually points to another site in Google’s directory. Next, take a look at checkpagerank.net. Plug in the domain name and it will tell you if the page rank has been forged as well as link popularity. If the domain in question, doesn’t pass either of these checks, stay far far away. You work too hard for your money to be taken by some domain scammer.
Tags: page rank, SEO
