Fake PR – How do crooks fool Googlebot
Posted on October 28, 2009, by seogirl, under Cloaking, Fake PR, Google, Google Bot, Redirects.
I am back with Bang Guys. No fever No Cough and absolutely No Sneezing.. :D . Though I am feeling up to blab about almost anything in this world, but I have decided to talk something sense.
“Fake PR” is the word Ladies & Gentlemen – So many webmasters do it , so many SEO’s and Link Builder suffer from it. Some make money and some loose big money. But the question is “How do all these Black Hat SEO’s fool the super intelligent, running on an almost ideal algorithm, Googlebot?”.
There are different methods to get a Fake PR. Interestingly, I know of only 3. One is Techy type other is a smarty type.
1. Techy Type – Done by Redirecting/Cloaking – This is done by redirecting the Googlebot using a 301 / 302 redirect directly or with the use of cloaking (will tell you what this is) to some High PR site. The Googlebot feels that the visitors are landing on the High PR site and the masked page (low quality site) will temporarily gain the pagerank of the page it was redirected to. This may continue even after the domain masking or Redirects have been removed ( I have no answer to this) but gradually, the Pagerank does decline to Zero.
Cloaking - It is also a way of redirecting the search engine bot but unlike 301/302 redirects, here the SEO’s use a cloaking script in the .htaccess file to indirectly redirect the bot via IP address. Difference between Cloaking and Redirecting is just that the former is a smarter way to keep the bot confused for a longer time.
2. Smarty Type – In this case, what you have to do is have a lot of money. Go to Godaddy Auctions, buy a High PR Domain, make your own site live and keep monetizing from it mainly via text ads.
Detect a Fake PR – If you are smart and intelligent like me (SEOgirl) lol, and you are a singlet 
, then you can detect easily whether a website is Faking a PR or not. Read on -
1. Check the Cache version. Type – info:www.yourdomain.com or info:yourdomain.com. Check both ways for the current site and the cache version to be the same. If its not, then the site is faking the PR via Redirects.
Google info
2. Still not sure, then check the Back links via Yahoo Site explorer or Google info. If a site has PR8 but you find only few (say 25) back links to it that too of very low quality and unrelated, the site has a forged a pagerank.
3. Further, you can check the age of the domain – for a comparatively new domain, it is not possible to acquire such high rank in few months.
4. Internet Archive – the way back machine – Check for the previous history of the domain. This will tell you if the buyer bought a high PR domain and put up his new files to monetize the domain or not.
There are some more was to confirm this like by using a Fake PR Checker Tool which you can consider.
Why you should not Fake a PR?
1. When you use redirects, the actual back links to your site are accounted to the site you are masking to. This means Zero benefit from actual Link exchanges or reviews etc.
2. On removing the Redirects, as long as you don’t get noticed by the bots might help you get a PR for some time but there will always be a risk of getting banned any time.
3. If you are not here for short term monetary gains and to be thrown out of the SERPS , do not do it.
This post is by far my longest post on the blog and By God – What a Dashing Headline I used… ;) (Self Praise boosts up my confidence guys.. )
Bye Bye
P.S. – My Associate always advises ” 20 PR0 Back links are 1000 times better than a single PR8 (related/unrelated/fake) Back link “(for an average site).