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Beware Fake PageRank Domains and Page Links!
(rt) It’s not exactly a new technique, in fact it’s been around for almost as long as the Google toolbar has. All search engine optimization and marketing experts worth their salt have known about it for years.
But seeing that auctioning off domains or links on pages with purportedly high PageRank has developed into quite a cottage industry with serious money changing hands all the time, it should be pertinent to point out that not all may be as it seems here. In fact, quite a few if not the majority of domains and links being flaunted that way are plain fakes: they may display a PR of 8 or even higher, but in reality the buyer is being conned.
The trick itself is quite simple, exploiting a well known loophole in the Google toolbar’s PR feature: set up a page and do a 301 or meta refresh redirect to a URL with a high PR (such as google.com itself), a process also known as “URL jacking”.
The redirecting page will then “inherit” the target page’s PR value, thus giving the impression of being well positioned within the framework of this specific mechanism of content calibration.
No matter that search engine experts have known for long that Google’s PR doesn’t really affect ranking in the first place to any relevant degree: a sucker being born every minute, it’s not surprising that many clueless web site operators seem to fall for this scam recently – another sorry repercussion of the persistent myth surrounding PR as a purported ranking factor.
Unfortunately, checking out every page’s PR manually can be a very time consuming task. Here’s a German web site offering a free tool to do it online. While it is pretty much self-explanatory, if the German results messages should befuddle you, we’re offering a full translation in our forthcoming new issue of fantomNews Premium Edition. (Requires subscription but hey, it’s only $48 for a year!)
This is the → PageRank checkup site.
And this is where you can sign up for our → fantomNews Premium Edition.
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[ Keywords: Google toolbar, linkage, PageRank, PR, SEO/SEM scams ]
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