Have you ever considered of buying a link on a high Pagerank website to get a good quality one way backlink? For those who are serious and have bunch of money to spent to build up links pointing to your websites, you better give attention on the PageRank fraud.

It is achieved when offending domains use a 301 or 302 redirects that point their sites to sites with a high Pagerank. This is a well known trick in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, but people who aren’t familiar with SEO are most likely to fall for this.

Where to check if a website has genuinely high PageRank or a fake one? Head on to PageRank detection tool and follow the instruction. You can check this website, it passes most of the PageRank checkers but the exploit is exposed when it’s checked at PageRank detection tool. Here’s the screenshot of the result.

Note: The screenshot is taken on the same day as this post is written and the result might be different in the future

The following guides show you details on how to detect a website with fake PageRank website.

How can I check for fake PR?
You can use the fake PR check tool here. All you need to do is compare the URL you submitted to the results. If the domain name you entered has fake PR, the results will show a different domain name to the one you submitted.

Inconclusive results?
If it returns “Sorry, we cant verify the pagerank for this page”, then Google is unable to determine whether the PR is fake or not. If this is the case then you can use archive.org’s WayBack Machine to view old versions of a site to see whether or not a redirect was being used when the page was archived.

If you use archive.org to view the site’s history and the address in the URL changes when you click to view a result, then the domain was being redirected on that date.

Example:
hmdonl.com on February 11th 2005.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050211…www.hmdonl.com/

In this example the end of that URL changes to another domain name, meaning that on the date the site was archived the domain was being redirected. A good indicator of fake PR.

Are the results 100% conclusive?
There is a chance that the results are not correct.
The fake PR checker uses Google results so if the domain’s redirect has been removed and the results are updated on Google, the fake PR checker won’t see the previous redirect. That won’t happen overnight though.

Archive.org has no recent archives, they’re usually at least a year old, so they won’t show the most recent redirects. Also there is a chance that the domain could have been used legitimately after it was archived, so don’t go back to results from 1999 and expect them to be relevant.

Used in combination though, they’re very good at helping you spot fake PR.

Via: DigitalPoint forums