With the recent PageRank update, the auction forums have exploded with activity as people try to sell their domains and sites that have fresh PR.

This is all fine and good and is pretty typical of how the webmaster marketplace cycles each update. The danger during these times is with people selling sites that have a fake PageRank.

What is fake PageRank?

A site has a fake PageRank when the PR returned from the Google servers is actually the PR of a different site. A site with fake PageRank has basically “tricked” Google into thinking it’s actually another site on the web and then Google assigns both sites a matching PageRank score.

How does this work?

I’m not going to get into the technical specifics but here’s a very general overview of the means to “steal” another site’s PageRank.

A script is written on the stealing site that automatically redirects any incoming requests from Google’s webcrawler to another site with PageRank. This effectively confuses the Google spider into thinking the site’s are the same and the stealing site eventually, with enough redirects, inherits the other site’s PageRank.

What’s the problem? This sounds great.

The problem is that as soon as Google figures out what’s happening or the redirection described above is stopped (say, when the new owner takes control of the domain) then the PageRank will be removed and you’ll have a penalized site in Google’s index. And a penalized site in Google’s index is practically worthless.

How do I protect myself?

There are literally hundreds of sites on the web that will tell you what PageRank a site has. The problem is that very few of them will tell you if that PageRank is actually valid.

My personal preference is to run any sites I’m curious about through the service provided at Check Page Rank as they give you a really thorough breakdown of not only a site’s PR (whether it’s valid or not) but also information on the site’s indexed pages in various search engines.

If you want to see it in action, check out the stats for iamjacksdesign.com

The Bottom Line

Whenever you’re thinking about purchasing a site or a domain (particularly if you mainly are interested/concerned with its PageRank) be sure to do your own research.

That’s really the best advice I can give. Every single day someone gets ripped off by a fake PageRank scam because they don’t do their own fact finding and instead get lazy and trust someone’s word.

There’s absolutely no reason that the same thing should happen to you after reading this post.

SHAMELESS PLUG: This Monday’s edition of Jack’s Newsletter is going to be exclusively about PageRank and the issues/benefits surrounding it. If that sounds interesting to you then you might want to subscribe now.