Beware of Fake or Forged Page Rank While Purchasing a Website

I am writing this post on behalf of a small blunder created by one of my friend. He was lately into SEO activities and the dude decided to buy a ready made website related to his niche (Travel). As per my advice he searched in DigitalPoint.com’s Market Place for a website suited for his interest and budget. I also cautioned him to be careful while purchasing websites and asked him to make a good research on a website before buying it.

After a few days he rang me up and told me that he had purchased a website with a Google Page Rank 4 for just 30 USD. He was really pumped up, as it was clear from his way of talking. I really felt shocked and some doubts started creeping into my mind regarding the price and the Page Rank of the website. I asked him to mail me the URL of the website and he did it immediately.

I opened the URL in my browser and was really glad to see the Google Tool Bar showing  a page rank 4. I just checked the number of pages of the website and found that it was around more that 400. I just thought the the guy had made a good deal of buying a PR 4 website for a  mere 30 USD. Then I checked the most important factor and that was the backlink of the website and to my astonishment there was not even a single backlink either in Google or Yahoo SiteExplorer. I also found out that the website was barely 2 months old. I smelt something fishy and after checking the cached version, I was really  shocked to find out that my friend had been smartly fooled in the website deal as website was having a Fake Page rank. I informed this to him and he was really depressed to know about it.

Such page rank faking is a black hat SEO technique by writing some scripts in the web pages or in the .htaccess files, which fetches the page rank of some other site with good page rank mentioned in the script. When a request for page rank is send, Google gets the fake page rank of the website with good PR. As a result even if your site is new and doesn’t have any back links you would be able to show some good page rank in the Google tool bar. This is a kind of cloaking.

I wrote this just to inform everyone to be careful when buying websites with good Page rank and to take precaution against. Such types of blunders can be avoided if you are a little alert and know how to check whether a page rank is fake or not. You can check it out manually or through some free online tools.

If you want to check it manually just type “cache:domainname.com”  in Google search bar. This query will return you the cached version of the website in Google’s search database. If the cached version shows some other website instead of your website, then you can assume that some type of black hat method is implemented on your website. You can also search for “info:domainname.com” in the Google search bar, and if Google shows results for some other website, then it would be pretty clear that your page rank is faked. Finally you can also check the backlinks and you can see there would not be sufficient backlinks for you site to get that high page rank.

I also used an online tool http://www.checkpagerank.net/, which says whether our page rank is forged or real. How ever after knowing this  I suggested him some tips to get rid of this fake page rank which I would like to share with you.

1) Remove suspicious redirect codes from web pages
2) Remove suspicious redirect code from .htaccess, if any.
3) Try to get good links from sites with good page rank.
4) Try to bookmark the site in various social bookmarking sites.
5) Request for a website reconsideration with Google Webmasters Tool.
6) Wait for some time till Google reconsiders your site and indexes the original version.

After step 6 you can see that your page will be having the original page rank and you can also search for “cache:domainname.com” and “info:domainname.com” which will give you the results for the original version of your site. So at any time you face such issues, just follow the above steps and wait for Google to crawl your original version. There is nothing more to panic, but as per an old proverb “Prevention is Better Than Cure”.