Fake PR and dropped domains in link building
It is every website owner’s wish to obtain links from high PR sites. Although it is ethically wrong to sell or buy links according to major search engines. Buying and selling links continues to be a multi-million dollar business. Like most other online businesses, link sale too is based on mutual trust. Unfortunately there are criminals everywhere and link selling business is not an exception. It is possible to fake the PR of a page in order to increase the price of the links. Innocent website owners and webmaster unaware of the fact would spend hundreds of dollars to obtain links from these fraudulent websites.
There are two possible ways in which the PR of a website can be faked. The first one is by the way of using scripts to fool the Googlebot by redirecting it to a webpage with high page rank and thus the pagerank bar shows the PR of a different site instead of the actual PR of the site you are viewing. The following is a sample of how a fake PR code will appear.
/* a cloaking script is used here to check if the visitor is
Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo '‘;
exit ();
}
else {
echo “
My PR9 page!
“;
}
?>
One other method is less offensive than the previous faking method. Here the vender purchases expired-domains with high pageranks and makes a deal with the buyer. Google has two updates on PR the first one is internal PR and the other one is external PR. While internal PR is updated daily, it takes some time for the search engine to update the external PR.
Thus until the next update the PR of the expired domain seems to be high, however, a check on the website will reveal the true PR status of the domain. Purchasing links from such websites will deliver no link juice and you lose your money for an unworthy link. During the next update you will find the PR of the expired domain to be much lower that what you had dealt with.
There simple ways to check if the PR of a website you are viewing is genuine. Simply type the website URL in the Google search and check the cache. The cache will be that of the site with actual PR and not that of the one with fake PR. You can also check with the waybackmachine to check if a domain has been dropped and purchased for a fake website.
Another simple manual check is to find the number of backlinks of the website using backlink checking tools. If it has a few backlinks then the PR is faked. There are also a few online tools that let you know about the true PR of a website. For example checkpageranking.com provides you with complete details about the backlinks and PR of a website within seconds.
