Mikael Rieck is the author of more than hundred articles on topics of how to make money both online and offline. He has been online since 1999 and has always had a passion for money making opportunities and teaching others how to make a profit.How To Check Fake Pagerank On Websites – A Tool Review
If you’re looking to buy a website or a link on a website how can you be sure to detect a faked pagerank?
Since a site’s PR will have a great impact on the price that the seller can charge there are people that create false pageranks for their sites in order to artificially drive up the selling price.
Being on the other end of the trade you should always check whether the reported PR is real or faked.
Unfortunately I found that the tools that are “available” to test whether something fishy is going on is either not working or is not giving you the correct results.
But let me go through them one by one.
Reviewing Fake Pagerank Checker Tools
The #1 listing is CheckPageRanking.com and to test the tool I entered this blog as I know that it is totally clean and nothing “mysterious” is going on. Here is the result:
Well at least it got the pagerank right and also that the site is not listed in DMOZ, Google and Yahoo! Directory. But that was not what I wanted to use this tool for was it now? I wanted to know whether or not the PR was fake or not. Obviously this tool believes that my pagerank is “forged” which I know that it is not and my only conclusion is that this tool has failed the test.
The #2 listing is SEOlogs.com and unfortunately there isn’t even a tool to test here. Instead I’ll just leave you with a screenshot.
The #3 listing is CheckPagerank.net and it is easily mistaken by the #1 listing CheckPageranking.com. The sites are almost identical in nature and design but strangely enough they come up with two very different results:
Where the first fake pagerank checker would actually get the PR right (even though it thought it was forged) this tool can’t even find the pagerank and says that my blog has a PR0. The only two things it got right were that the site is not listed in DMOZ and that the domain is about 2 months old (something that the #1 listing could not find).
PR checker tool #4 is from TextLinkAdvisor.com but judging by the picture below something has definitely gone wrong and the tools doesn’t seem to work either:
And finally the #5 listing is a tool from ValidRank.com – This tool shows you an Alexa Traffic Graph and the IP of the site. That is fine and all but still nothing about whether the pagerank is fake or not. As you can see in the picture below this tools has coding errors as well when trying to do a pagerank analysis:
Rank Check Conclusion
Now I went on to try a few more tools but all of them had either errors or produced incorrect results. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to find this as I would expect that at least 1 in top 5 would provide me with the information that I wanted but unfortunately that was not the case.
So instead of using tools here is what I found:
This first article will explain how fake PR is created and will provide decent knowledge on what is going on behind the scenes.
The second article gives you 7 ways to check whether the pagerank is faked or not
My best advice is that if you believe that something strange is going on then don’t deal with that person. Better safe than sorry.
To Your Success,
Mikael
7 Responses so far
Sire
June 5th, 2009
11:09 pm
That first one returned a valid rank for me, which I knew to be true and I just went there to see what would happen. I don’t think I will be buying a website anytime soon, but I do believe that anyone who is planning to do so should take every measure possible to make sure their not buying one under false pretenses.
Manshu
June 6th, 2009
4:19 am
Shouldnt Google Toolbar be the right and easy way to do this? I dont understand why a tool is needed to do this?
MIrjam
June 6th, 2009
7:20 am
here I was thinking that my blog has a PR3… but after reading this post, for all I know it could be a PR6 ROFL
but seriously, interesting but how do you really check your PR?
I think I am using search status (a FF addon) and say think because I have a few SEO addon´s installed so I can instantly check pagerank on the google search engine results whenever I am doing my keyword research.
Mikael
June 6th, 2009
7:53 am
@Sire, well it applies both for buying websites but also just for buying links on websites (if one does that).
@Manshu, the reason for it is that the toolbar can be gamed (which is the whole reason for checking).
@Mirjam, LOL…. I don’t think that it work that way. You would actively have to do something to your own site to fake a pagerank. FF addons are great as long as they’re not picking up the data from the same place at the one that might be altered (because then it’ll still lie to you).
Mirjam
June 6th, 2009
9:44 am
right, never thought about that so that is a good reminder, thanks
Sire
June 6th, 2009
11:49 pm
That’s something else I don’t plan on doing any time soon. Also, if I was to purchase a link I am more likely to look at traffic rather than PR.
Thomas Pedersen
June 7th, 2009
6:07 pm
That is a very cool tools, I can even see how my store looked 2 years ago.
great.
I’ll definitly use some of these when purchasing new sites.
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