This post will just be a quick tutorial on how to detect fake page rank. It is a question that is frequently asked which receives a variety of answers.
The reason it is so important to be able to check this is time and time again you see people who don’t know this simple trick being taken advantage of when they purchase websites based upon fake page rank.
So the first thing that you need to do is go open a browser to Google. The first thing you need to type into the search window is info followed directly by a colon. Immidiately following the colon by typing in the domain name that you want to check. So the entire query should look like:
info:www.thedomain.com
While substituting the domain you want to check into the query. Lets check the Authority Directory just as an example.
info:www.authoritydirectory.com <— Go ahead and click.
In the last line of the search results it tells you the domain returned just prior to the link to - Note this.
In our case that domain returned matches the domain which was queried meaning the page rank is valid. We searched for the domain www.authoritydirectory.com and www.authoritydirectory.com was returned.
Now for an example of one that is not valid so we will do the following search info:www.tigsd.com.
Notice in this example how the domain returned in the search does NOT match the domain we searched for? This domain does not have valid page rank since what we searched for was www.tigsd.com and what was returned was www.tig.com <— different domain.
That is really all there is to conducting the test, but there is one additional thing you should know.
Google will generally do a backlink export for results a couple weeks prior to every page rank update. During the window between that that export and prior to the Google toolbar update of page rank it would be possible for invalid page rank to appear as valid.
So anytime there is a suspected page rank update expected from Google be careful with using this method to check and see if a domain has valid page rank.
A special thanks to Rob at Directory Mix for his input in this post.
June 29th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Cool tidbit of info, thanks! I’ve often wondered what people meant by fake PR.
You can’t fake the PR on the toolbar itself though, can you? That’s what I usually use.
June 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Yes Dennis the toolbar page rank can be faked fairly easily. I have seen numerous cases of it. In this case just navigate to that tigsd.com site and see what the toolbar says. That is actually the page rank for tig.com.
Also I have seen clear examples where toolbar page rank has been mis represented by google itself. They manually lower it in the toolbar.
The only way I know to detect that is by 301 redirecting a url to the domain in question then comparing the two domains after an update.
June 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I’d have to want the info pretty badly to spend any real amount of time to get it.
PR is becoming less relevant by the day.
June 29th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Now that is the comment of the week Dennis! I could not agree more.
June 29th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
What do I win?
July 1st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Hello,
I stopped by to thank you for being on of my June EC Top Drops!
Kristie
July 1st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Thanks for stopping by Kristie, don’t be a stranger.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
i used to check on other PR checking sites .. but sometimes they are also not that helpful…
i didn’t knew about this trick u mentioned here … Thanx for sharing it.
and also wud like to ask u ..is this method total accurate ? can we rely fully on it ? as there are many ppl trying to fake out here
July 10th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Your right Puneet there are many people misrepresenting pagerank these days. I guess that when the inventors feel they can everyone does.
I mentioned in the post Puneet that there is a time that it is not 100% accurate. For the most part it is but between the link export and page rank update, not so much. That is now by the way.