Question: What does a woman faking an orgasm have in common with web masters buying fake Google PageRank text links?

Answer: They both get screwed at the end

The famous movie scene from When Harry met Sally with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a dinner is etched in every man’s mind as stark reminder that if a woman wants to make a guy think he is the ultimate lover, she can easily do it. There is a new breed of cyberspace fakers out there that want you to believe you are getting a good deal by buying a high PageRank text link from their site. The problem is, it’s very easy to fake PageRank and you may be the next fool buying a fake PageRank link. Although Google came out strong against sites openly advertising and selling text links, the message is still not getting through. People continue buy paid text links as the word about Google link driven algorithm is reaching the masses.
Google knocked down the PageRank of many sites selling PR or selling paid blog post reviews in October 2007. The publishing sites selling paid reviews on Payperpost.com and Reviewme.com got hit especially hard with PageRank drops and in some cases a complete wipe out of their PageRank.

Buying Google PR

Web masters had been buying links with high Google PageRank since around 2002 to gain higher PR and also higher ranking. Although Google had changed their algorithms many times over the years to decrease the importance of the Google PageRank in their ranking score and give higher weight to other factors such as links from authority sites and inbound anchor text, the PR is still an important consideration for many website owners pursuing high rankings. If you take a look at the top ranking sites for even moderately competitive terms you will find the average Google PageRank of the top 10 sites is still around 4-5, which is pretty high. These days it’s becoming harder and harder to obtain paid links that are flying under the Google paid link detection radar and when this happens opportunity knocks on the doors of fly-by-night operators.

Faking Google PageRank

What makes the situation even worse is sites pretending to sell links on high PR sites are using nothing more than simple 301 redirects, which can be easily replicated by anybody. There are a few ways a fake Google PageRank can be achieved. All methods require server side scripting to detect if the page being requested is a human or robot. We can find out if the page requestor is human or robot by checking for the user agent specification in the request header of the request or the IP address where the request is originating from.

The code in PHP would look something like this to detect the Googlebot and than redirect it to a page with high PR page, in this example MSN.com.

<?php
if (strstr($_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’], “Googlebot”)) {
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

// Insert the site whose PR you want to fake
header(”Location: http://www.msn.com/“);
exit;
}
else {
// Insert the URL of your real site here
header(”Location: http://www.myrealsite.com/“);
exit;
};
?>

How to detect fake PageRank

The simplest method to detect fake PR is to check the Google cached version of the page. You can do this by entering the URL into the Google search box and hitting enter. The search results should display the same URL as the one you have entered into the search box. If the PageRank is fake Google will return a different URL in the search results.

The Google cache command can also be used the same way. Enter cache:www.possiblefakeprsite.com into the Google search box and if the site’s PageRank is real you will see an identical version of the page displayed otherwise you may get a page not found message from Google or a completely different page altogether.

Fake Google PR example

There will always be people who are looking for opportunities to profit from other people’s lack of knowledge and experience and the SEO field is no exception. I have noticed recently several Google Adwords content ads and other sites promoting these scum bags selling fake PR text links. I have just found a new ad promising a PR6 link on iWebTool’s Page Rank Prediction page, how ironic is this. Well, it’s not really ironic at all, if you think about it a little bit. Where do you find the best audience for this type of services? Of course on sites that put together a few simple scripts to check PageRank or predict future PageRank.

Here is our innocent looking ad promising a PR 6 link for $19 a year. A deal really, if the PageRank was real.

The site behind the ad is http://www.spaceadvocate.com/. The site could be gone by the time you read this, so I have created a screen shot.

Here is the screen shot from the Google cache command cache:http://www.spaceadvocate.com/. As you can see Google knows nothing about this page. In other cases you may find a page that is indexed by Google, but it will be different from the original one.

Here is a Google search that may turn up a few more fake PageRank sellers. These are typical template based sites so it’s easy to find “foot prints” left behind by PageRank fakers. Consider yourself being warned, the PR fakers are out there.

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