With links on high page ranked pages often selling for a lot of money, some website owners have been using black hat SEO techniques to give their site a fake Page Rank.  What this means is that whilst their website may only be a PR1 or PR2 it appears to be higher such as a PR7 or PR8.  To prevent yourself from being scammed, it’s a good idea to know how fake page ranks work and how you can ensure you are only buying or trading links from true high Page Rank websites.

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank is a numerical value that Google gives to every web page.  This value is updated every few months and is in theory meant to tell other webmasters about the quality of the page.  Google Page Rank numbers go up from 0 to 10 with ten being the highest rank available.  Each level is harder to reach than the one before it.  Due to the influence of Google Page Rank some unscrupulous webmasters will fake their page rank in order to trade links with other high authority sites or to make more money from the links that they sell.

How Can Page Rank Be Faked?

As with many things on the web, black hat SEO techniques get developed in order to try and “blindside” the search engines.  It is incredibly easy to fake a Page Rank and all a webmaster has to do is redirect their webpage’s domain to that of a higher domain.  By using a cloaking code webmasters can set their webpage to only re-direct when a GoogleBot visits the website, so a normal website user would not be able to tell that anything dishonest was happening.

Whilst you may be thinking of also faking your website’s Page Rank: a word of warning.  Website’s that fake their Page Rank will not be indexed in the Google search engines.  So whilst you may be able to scam people into buying links, you will be doing your website more harm than good in the long run.  In addition if you fake your website’s Page Rank in order to sell your website you could end up facing legal action for fraud.  You are much better off increasing your Page Rank using tried and tested ‘white hat SEO’ techniques and staying away from anything that can be considered ‘black hat’.

How to Check a Website’s True Page Rank

If you are thinking about buying or trading links with a high Page Rank website, you are highly recommended to verify that the Page Rank of the site is as high as the webmaster makes out.  To do this you can use a Fake Rank Checker Tool which will validate the true Page Rank of any website that is entered.  All you need to do is enter the website URL of the webpage you want to check, and the website’s true Page Rank will be revealed.