Watch out for sites with fake PageRank!

This is no breaking news but it is really something that needs to be addressed and discussed. I was browsing through a webmaster forum when I came across a thread discussing sites with fake Google PageRank that is selling links.

In the thread they showed examples of how they do to manipulate the PageRank for their site and all these fakers have to do is put this code in to a .htaccess file on their server ” Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.google.com ”

I do not know how this work since I have never tried it myself, but what this code does is that it redirects the visitors to Google.com which has a PageRank of 10, then after the first PageRank update they remove the code and their site now has a PageRank of 10.
Of course they can do this with any other domain wich has a PageRank they desire.

My advice is to always look up a sites PageRank and other interesting facts before buying a link on the site and that you do not focus so much on the PageRank of a site, there are a lot of other more important factors of a site when buying a link, like the niche and traffic.
A great tool to use is the Fake PageRank Detector at SEOlogs, it shows you if the PageRank is real or not.

April 8, 2007 | Filed Under Tips