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April 9, 2008

Lucky Webmaster Buys PageRank 10 Site

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.



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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at April 9, 2008 8:09 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

PR 1 or PR 10, who cares if the website doesnt have traffic and rankings?

 

Posted by Jaan Kanellis at April 9, 2008 08:37

I still use Page Rank as a guide to a websites health and history, generally it works to filter out the good from the bad, however thats about as deep as its gets for me, its nice to have high PR sites though, good for marketing to show your high PR even if it means nothing to most webmasters.

 

Posted by Barrie Adams at April 9, 2008 08:44

I care because the algorithm uses inbound linking to determine ranking. Higher PR will help you get a higher ranking and a higher ranking will help you get more clicks.

 

Posted by Andrew the Giant at April 9, 2008 08:44

Andrew the Giant, where have you been? PR means nothing of the sort these days. Only a couple of months back many sites went to PR0 but their search rankings and traffic either remained the same or improved.

PR means nothing these days. The sooner Google is rid of it the better.

 

Posted by Dave at April 9, 2008 09:29

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