Fake Pagerank – 2 Steps For Detecting Fake PR Websites
Posted on November 9, 2009
Filed Under SEO
I’ve gotten a fair share of link exchange emails and some of them offered to place a link to my site on a high pagerank site.
Well, some of these sites have a fake pagerank displayed. I don’t know how they do it but I do know how to detect fake pagerank sites and stay away from these losers and cheaters.
Here’s an example of an email I got a few days ago:
—————————————
Hi!
Your website freedomideas.com is very interesting, and I’d like to know if you’d agree on placing a link to my partner’s website. I’m trying to get links for a business website.
In exchange, I could offer you a link back from http://www.adstro-online . com (Page Rank 4).
If you agree to this exchange, please place a link in your website with the following details:
Title: …
URL: …
Once my link is up, don’t forget to contact me back and send me the information of your site (title and URL) so I can give you the links I promised. Also, let me know if you have more websites, maybe we could do some more exchanges?
Thanks for the attention! Hope to hear back from you!
Link Exchange Team
——————————————————————–
So if you go to adstro online website, you’ll see that it shows a pagerank 4 in your toolbar.
There are a few steps you can take to check if this pagerank is valid or not.
1. info:www.domain.com in Google – this is usually the only thing you need to do and here’s what you can see in this example:
You can see that you typed in one domain into the search box and Google shows you another domain as the info for that page – the astro-share . com.
Somehow the astro-share site is redirecting the pagerank to the adstro-online site. If you see another domain as the result of the info: query in Google, then something bad is going on.
2. Link:www.domain.com in Yahoo – see if the site really receives many quality backlinks to deserve the pagerank 4 status. If you’ve ever started a site from scratch, you surely know how much work and backlinks it takes to get the site to PR4.
Holy cow! They got to pagerank 4 without any backlinks! That has to be some pagerank magic or …
… it’s a fake pagerank.
Wherever there is money, there are cheaters. Stay away from those and let karma take care of them…
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12 Responses to “Fake Pagerank – 2 Steps For Detecting Fake PR Websites”
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This site explains HOW people do it – http://www.monetizers.com/fake-pr.php
It wad down when I went to it but the Google Cache version was working.
Thanks for sharing, Bryan!
Nice point Tomaz, I run the site in the link diagnosis tool and I received 0 links back (despite that the site is PR4).
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/index.php?q=http://www.adstro-online.com
Wow, I never knew that one can fake Page Rank. I have heard of fake earnings like clickbank….but Page Rank? The internet is full of crap, no wonder Google slaps are always on-going…
wow thanks – i never knew how to detect that
Great tips Tomaz, I will keep this in mind when I start link building.
Sherman
Thanks for that Tomaz – another valuable piece of information.
There’s always going to be people who think it’s OK to screw everyone else. Let’s hope the karma kicks their ass for them! (Can I say ass?)
The thing that gets me is that if they put the energy and motivation into a real business then they’d make so much more.
Go figure.
Great advice. My website is slowly starting to pick up since creating it, and I’ve gotten a lot of link exchanges. Except when you try and contact these people, they ignore you. Thanks for the tips on how to verify if it’s a real site or not.
Hi Tomaz – thanks for sharing this (along with everything else). I have a question related to your point on fake PR. I was going to use freelancer dot com to see if I could outsource some linkbuilding. I looked at some of the specs for work required e.g.”I want 100 PR3+ oneway links …. to my website on blue bananas” but since looking at your article it seems that if I was to do this, I would probably end end up with a lot of fake PR links.
Instead, I am planning to ask for 50 sites related to my keywords with resources page of PR2+ so that I can check the PRs out for myself. Do you think I am being too cautious?
All the best – and thanks for all your help again, Mike (from Barcelona conference)
Hi Mike,
You can get the links like you “ordered” – 100 PR3+ links – but they will be on a page with 50 other links on a crappy site. I’ve tried that before and got no benefits from them.
Maybe you’ll have more luck. In any case, the freelancer will send you a report after the job done and you can check the sites to see if they have fake pagerank.
You can add the requirement into the project text (links must not be on fake pagerank pages) so that you win a dispute later if this happens.
Since Google took off pagerank off of the toolbar, what is the easiest way to view a site’s / page’s pagerank?
Hey Ryan,
Install SearchStatus plugin for Firefox. It’ll show pagerank and Alexa (and other stuff if you want to). Just Google for it…