Scamming PageRank

In the last couple of weeks, I've gotten several emails from people trying to sell me text links based upon their PageRank (PR). The emails always make huge claims about their PR and try to convince me that I would be passing up a good opportunity if I didn't respond. If you ever get an email like the one below, be careful since they are probably trying to scam you.

Here is how they typically go:

Hi,

My name is John Doe from whateverwebsite.com. I am emailing you because text links can be a key factor to successful search engine optimization and can dramatically increase your Google rankings. The higher the PageRank of the site that links to you, the stronger the link will be. I currently have one site with text links available that has a Google PageRank of 10. I am limiting the number of text links on my website to 10 and there are only four spots left. Since they are going fast, I encourage you to examine my website and look at the PageRank. I am confident that you will find this opportunity exciting and valuable. I am currently selling each link for $1000 per month and your text link will go on every page of my website. If you are interested please email me ASAP at johndoe@whateverwebsite.com.


Basically, you can check out the website and it will appear that they have a PR of 10. However, if you do a backlink check in Google you will see that all the links are going to another PR 10 site and not their website. In most cases they do a redirect to Google.com or a different PR 10 site. This gives them a fabricated PR of 10 and therefore the text link will not be doing anything for your website.

These are the steps they take:

  1. Get a domain name
  2. Do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess or php header
  3. Wait for Google to crawl and do a PR update
  4. Use some type of cloaking script
  5. Bingo, a PR 10 site.

This is an example of what the code looks like:

<?php
/* Insert cloaking script to detect if the visitor is a Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.google.com/">';
exit();
}
else {
echo "<p>My PR 10 website!</p>";
}
?>


If you want to see a website that faked their PR on purpose as a joke, check out pr10.darkseoteam.com.

The point is to be careful of these things. Text links can be effective but they must be from a reputable source and not one of these bogus sites. Just be cautious about anybody that claims they have a PR of 10, there are only a handful of them that really do.

Enjoy the post? Here are some more that may interest you.

SES

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Reader Comments (2)

Sean McManus, April 6, 2006

That darkseoteam page now has a pagerank of zero, so Google's presumably closed this loophole. It's worth noting as well that BMW was banned from the German Google index in part for feeding different content to the Google spider to what it fed to human visitors. Google's guidelines say you're not allowed to cloak, so you risk Google Death if they find out.

Neil Patel, April 6, 2006

Thanks for bringing up these points Sean, we appreciate your input. It's nice to see that Google may have closed this loophole.