Just this morning Ped was nice enough to point me to an article,
Beware of Fake PageRank at Codezwiz. I am hardly focused on the article, but more or less how one user can fake Google page rank. I have never really thought about it, but I am sure it pisses Google off. I started doing some research and came up with some great resources information.
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
I could try to explain cloaking, but I think
Aaron Wall's Seo Glossary sums it up.
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:
I am very interested in some of the legit uses of cloaking and over the next few months I will learn more.
Faking Page Rank using PHP
(this script doesn't actually function, but gives a good idea of another way to fake PR using php). The following technique is something I would consider more safe, but anytime you fake page rank its really easy to spot.
Check out where all the links lead too for codezwiz.com now. As you notice all the pages lead to
phpnuke.org.
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
Faking page rank has no long term bonuses in reality. The only gain is advertising might pick up for a short while before someone easily discovers your trick and possibly reports you to Google. Which can lead to being banned quickly.
