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Spotting sites with fake pagerank
Monday, October 01, 2007
Oh, once again, I'm resorting to looking at spam e-mails. This one caught my eye because it was sent to an address I rarely use. On the surface of things, it looks genuine...
Interested buying a PR4 text link? I have a PR4 blog [site name removed] and would like to offer you a sitewide Text Link for:
$90 for 1 year
$50 for 6 months
$30 for 3 months
A PR4 site normally cost you around $30 per month.
How does it work? When you buy this offer your link will be placed on the homepage as well as every pages of [site name removed].
I don't know the going rates of buying a text link on a PR4 site, but it sounds like not too bad an offer.
Firstly, I whizzed over to the site and noticed that there were very few blog posts, most of which were over a year old and only one in the last month. Hmmm...So I went to google and typed in the site name with the 'www' removed. It came up with about 62 links for the site which isn't a lot for a PR4 site, and the descriptions of the site didn't match the content. Google only cached this page on 27th September, so it's been changed in the last few days.
Next, I went to the Wayback Machine and saw what was indexed there - the last listing for the site was August 2006 and the site was very different from what it is now...hang on a second, some of the current blog posts go back to before August 2006...perhaps it being a WordPress site, the database was imported to give the impression of the site being older than it is.
Finally, I went to the whois record for the domain, but this gave me no useful information.
So what does this tell me? The site has been changed very recently, which means that the PR that Google has assigned to the site does not apply to the new changes. In fact, in the next pagerank update, chances are the site will lose out. If you paid any money to have your textlink on the site, you'd be a bit miffed if you realised that you'd paid for a fake wouldn't you?
Lesson to learn? If you do want to buy a text link from a site, spend a few minutes checking before you part with your cash, and if something doesn't add up, don't do it.
Labels: spam
