RSS FeedFake PR
January 15th, 2008 by Rami
The other day, I came across a black hat SEO technique that lets webmasters increase their page rank almost instantaneously. A good chunk of the webmasters know about this, but there’s a big group of those who don’t know anything. Let me explain.
One driving factor of SEO is link building, and we all know that getting links from high PR websites is key. The way fake PR works is simple: If you visit page X with PR 2, typically, a PR checker will show PR2 (for e.g. PageRank bar on a Google tool bar). If you visit page Y with PR 8, then the PR checker will show PR8. Simple, but now imagine if, when visiting page X you are immediately redirected to page Y. Or in other words the page that is actually being checked is page Y, then the PR checker will read PR8 and not PR2. Simply speaking, this is how the fake PR technique works. The technique redirects Google bots from page X to page Y while keeping the user on page X. When the Google bots are redirected to page Y, the bar for e.g. will read PR 8 (that of page Y), because that’s the page Google thinks you are viewing.
Before you get too excited and start redirecting Google bots crawling your site to sites with higher PR, it may interest you to know that this technique does nothing in terms of SEO. It doesn’t improve your rankings, and worse yet, by redirecting the big G’s spiders to another page, you hurt your chances of being picked up by Google properly. However, with the increasing demand for in-bound links from high PR websites, webmasters are using this technique to trick clients into thinking they are purchasing quality links to their websites. It’s easy for someone to fall for this, because when you visit the prospective website you simply trust the Google PR bar on the top. And when you’re offered a PR8 in-bound link for just $15, you’re just taken by it. You have no reason to doubt the PR bar, the price is great, and you don’t want to pass up the chance - so you pay for the link without giving it a second thought.
For the skeptical and the worried, I’ve luckily stumbled upon this Fake PageRank Detection SEO tool that should save you guys and girls some grief. Give it a try the next time you’re making an investment based on the PR of a website to make sure you’re not falling prey to fake PR tactics.
