PhpNuke SEO Faking your Page Rank (1202 Reads) 

How did this web site get this high PageRank number?

The web sites used a relatively simple trick. A known loophole in the Google algorithm is that a web page that redirects to another web page will get the PageRank number of the redirected web page.

A web page that redirects to Google.com will get a PageRank of 10 because web surfers that go to the redirection page will actually land on Google.com which has a PageRank of 10.

To get a high PageRank number, a web site must just redirect to Google.com (or another page with a high PageRank) when the Google spider visits the site. This is a technique called cloaking.

Cloaking Pages

Cloaking

Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.

Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

• The Definitive Guide to Cloaking - Dan Kramer's guide to cloaking. I also interviewed Dan here.
• KloakIt - cheaply priced cloaking software
• Fantomaster - more expensive cloaking software

Faking Page Rank using PHP

Sites fake PR by looking for the Googlebot, then redirecting it to a high PR site, like Yahoo.com. Google sees that users actually land on Yahoo.com and the PR Bar in turn reflects the PR of the Yahoo.com rather than your site.

Here is an example of what Fake PR code looks like:

<?php
/* insert a cloaking script here to detect whether the visitor is
Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.google.com/">';
exit();
}
else {
echo "<p>My PR10 page!</p>";
}
?>

Conclusions