Avoid fake rank when purchasing domain names

When purchasing a domain name website or blog a lot of people turn to aged domains by registering expired domains or purchasing a domain from a reseller. Aged domains are domains that have been in use or at least registered previously.

Logically, aged domains are a sought-after commodity. Besides the fact that the aged domain probably has lots of incoming links and traffic, Google and other search engine bots value aged domains higher than newly created domains.

Since many people consider Google to be The Authority on ranking domains/websites, Google Page Rank (PR) is considered a key factor in valuing a domain name. When starting up a new venture, many website owners purchase a domain with an existing PR in order to get things rolling quicker.

This is mainly because a domain name with a PR has more chance of getting indexed by Google and receiving search traffic a lot faster then launching your new website on a new domain which will usually be stuck in the Google sandbox for at least a few weeks.

This is where it gets interesting.

Brace yourself. Google PR CAN BE FAKED! Some of you might say that is old news, but I constantly see and hear about people complaining after being duped by a fake PR.

Faking PR to dupe an unsuspecting domain buyer is extremely easy.

People fake PR by coding their site trick the GoogleBot. Once GoogleBot visits their site, they simply redirect GoogleBot to a high PR ranking site. Therefore PR checking websites indicate the domain has the PR of the high PR ranking site that GoogleBot was redirected to.

So, if I wanted to fake DNXpert.com’s PR - current proud PR of 4 - I would redirect GoogleBot to Yahoo.com - and get DNXpert.com a PR of 9. So, when visiting DNXpert.com GoogleBot sees Yahoo.com while everybody else visiting the website, sees a normal website.

Now, you might say, but what if the domain is not resolving to any site - ie there is nowhere to hide the redirect code. How can the PR be faked?

Simple, the seller might have faked the PR, got it indexed by GoogleBot, then removed the site so that the domain does not resolve before they attempt to sell it to you. Since Google indexing does not happen immediately, this change might take a while to take effect and hence the fake PR will stand in the eyes of any normal PR checker tool.

Ok, now that I have scared you, here is how to detect fake PR.

Use a fake PR checker. A site I use often to check for fake PR is checkpagerank.net. They also provide useful additional information with regards to a domain name like the count of incoming links from major search engines, whether the domain has been listed in major directories etc. When the fake PR checker suspects false play with a site’s PR, it displays a warning amongst the results.

Important note: make sure you enter www.yourdomain.com in the search box. For example, here are the results for DNXpert.com http://www.checkpagerank.net/index.php?name=www.dnxpert.com&links=1

If you want to avoid using a fake PR checker, you can utilize Google cache. Type cache:domainnamethatyouwanttocheck.com in the Google search box and hit search. Google cache shows the site that the GoogleBot sees. So if I faked DNXpert.com PR value as explained above, cache:dnxpert.com would display Yahoo.com in the result of the cache query.

I hope that you will consider fake PR the next time you decide to purchase an aged domain.

PS. Another thing many of us do is purchase links from high PR sites in order to boost our own site’s PR. The reason we do this is so that Google bots notice that there is an incoming link from a high PR site to our site. Of course fake PR DOES NOT boost the PR of sites purchasing links on that website. I have seen a lot of directories fake PR and then sell PR links. Watch out for that!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.