Have you ever visited a website that had very little content, no visible SEO practices, and wondered how in the world they managed to gleam a page rank of 6?
This is often achieved by using a combination of a redirect and cloaking. Put simply, search engine spiders are redirected to a website with a much higher page rank – and Google assigns this higher rank to the starting page as well as the landing page. When a visitor lands on the website, all we see is a big honking green bar, because the redirect doesn’t effect us – just spiders.
“Yeah, yeah, but I’m a writer, what does this all mean to me?“
Well… if you have a web presence at all, you want to be found, right? You’re probably already using many SEO tactics – such as link exchanges. Say you’re interested in promoting your portfolio, and want to exchange links with websites similar to your own, and you want to stay within a certain page rank. How do you know if the page rank of the website you’re interested is legitimate?
Page Rank Checking Tools may be of little use on this, because they often return the same result as your own Google bar is displaying. The fastest and most reliable way is to use the power of Google and simply type in: info:http:URL – and hit search.
The part you want to pay attention to is that green URL at the bottom. If it’s not the same URL that you entered in your search – you’ve discovered a redirect. A faker. Linking to a website that has done this will do you absolutely no good, because it’s unlikely that your content would be any sort of match for the content on the redirect landing page.
Another instance where this page rake fake out is important is contextual advertising. If you’re a blogger who does this kind of work, you know how important page rank is to your amount of compensation. As tempting as the fake out may seem, do not do this! If you’re caught stealing green with fake page ranks, in order to gain more green in compensation – you may end up with your blog being banned from both Google and the sponsored ad company.
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