The problem of fake pagerank has plagued Google for the past couple of years now. And google seems not too adamant about doing anything about this problem. Meanwhile thousands of people are being duped into buying domains and websites which seem to be very high quality but end up with buyer's remorse when they realize after a Google PR update that their PR had been faked. In this post I shall explorer how pagerank is faked and ways you can protect yourself from ever being conned by fake pagerank.
How Fake Pagerank Came To Be
It started with a Google pagerank feature of being able to point the googlebot to your new website in case you change your domain name. This is a problem that had stopped many webmasters from moving their websites to new better fitted domains for their websites. They didn't want to lose all of the precious pagerank they had attained over the years just so they can get a better domain. So the ever helpful Google came up with a seemingly easy solution. The answer: 301 or 302 redirects to the new domain. That way your old website would be redirected to your new one and your pagerank along with it. But one thing they didn't count on was the fact that this worked both ways. So now if your new website had a pagerank it would be transfered to your old domain.
The funny thing in all of this is of course the fact that the new website doesn't have to have your code in order to be fast forwarded to through a 301 or 302 redirect. SO in essence you can redirect to any website you wanted regardless of who owned it. So users started redirecting their unfinished or private websites to Google so as to make sure a visitor isn't disappointed by the default list of files. But something funny happened when they did this. When they checked their pagerank after a pagerank updated it had changed to 10 or Google's pagerank. This astounded some of these users and the news spread fast.
Now all kinds of people fast forwarded their domains to Google to try to get that PR10. It was quickly found out however that after the next update when you had removed your redirect to try to show off your allegedly PR10 website your web site's PR went back to zero. This made users shy away from using this method for a while. But then domain sellers caught wind of this and realized the potential for it. It went something like this. Buy a new domain redirect it and wait till it gets that PR10 then change it back to your website and sell it quick before the next PR update. And here is the current problem as they have gotten smarter and started redirecting to lower Pr websites such as PR4 to PR7. This made the PR more believable as only about 3 websites have PR10.
How To Detect a Fake Pagerank
This is relatively easy as long as the faker hasn't changed his website back to it's original and still has the redirect going. Or even if he just changed it recently and Google hasn't had a chance to update it's cache yet. Basically all you do is check the web site's cache in Google and check to see if it matches the website showing in your browser. If it doesn't match then the pagerank is faked. There even is some tools that have been recently made to check for this here's one:
