Detecting Fake PageRank

Have you ever come across a site with a really high PR that you thought did not really deserve it? The site had very few backlinks, hardly any content and no life but still had a PR 6? Well then this is one of the cases of having FAKE PageRank. That's right! A lot of sites have tried to produce a fake pagerank for themselves and succeeded.

A fake pagerank can bring you a lot of money if you are smart enough to hide it properly. But there are always ways to detect a site that has a fake pagerank. I am not really sure right now if Google has taken any serious action against such sites or plans to take later on but right now it is on you to detect such sites before getting into any kind of deal (link exchanges, buying links etc) with them.

In this post, I will try my best to teach you how to tell if a website has a fake pagerank or not. Remember knowing this information can save you a lot of money since there are a lot of people that try to sell websites with fake pagerank.

Four Steps to Detect a Fake PageRank:

1. Check PageRank using a PageRank checker tool
2. Search: info:http://URL in Google
3. Look at the URL listed at the bottom of the first result in green
4. If the URL is different then the one that you put in first then it is a FAKE PageRank
   

I recently came across a website called John Doe's Blog that had a fake pagerank. So I will be using this site as an example. I do not want to provide a link to this website in this post because I do not want to give any backlinks to people who cheat others. The website can be found at "wearestjohns(dot)com". I will be referring to this site as JDB from now on.

Lets follow the four steps mentioned above in detail and see if JDB has a fake PageRank or not.

Step 1
If you go to any PageRank checking site then you will notice that JDB has a PageRank 6. Most people will just stop there and assume that JDB really has a PageRank 6.

Step 2, 3 and 4
Now go to Google and search info:http://wearestjohns.com. You will notice that the first result looks like this:



As you can see, the URL in green is different from JDB's URL. This means that the PageRank is fake. JDB has actually redirected Google(bot) to a high PageRank site such as the one shown in the image above and made it seem as if JDB has that PageRank.

Looking at a site with valid PageRank
My blog has a valid PageRank 4 currently and this is how I can prove it. Go to Google and search info:http://omarabid.blogspot.com and you will see this search result:



As you can see, the URL entered before is the same as the URL shown in green. Thus, the PageRank is valid.

After reading this post, most of you will also be interested in knowing how to get a fake pagerank even if you do not want to use it. I will publish another post later with all the information you need to get a fake pagerank. So subscribe to my feed and stay up-to-date with all the latest posts.