I have been tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld where this webmaster is shocked to learn that the site he just acquired now has a PageRank score of 10. Before buying the site, it had no PageRank score at all but soon after, it jumped up to a 10 out of 10!
Lucky Webmaster!
Well, not really. My first impression was that someone was spoofing the PageRank, which it turned out to be. So, someone was showing Google.com's PageRank value when you visited the site. There are many tools that check a site's true PageRank, so it is best to go with one of those tools in these cases.
The webmaster confirmed the issue and expressed his confusion:
OK, thanks very much to Miamacs here on WebmasterWorld for catching that some previous design of the site did the 'nasty fake redirect to Google.com' trick to get PR 10.What I'm still confused about is why it didn't show up until they switched to the new site. Still, I'll be extremely pissed if it comes back to bite them... because, as their current provider, it'll be up to us to fix it.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
