Websites for Sale - Site Sales Blog

How To Validate the PageRank of a Website

March 3rd, 2006

I once in a while see somebody trying to sell a website which they claim has a pagerank of X. And there is a lot of buyers that base some of their valuation on how high the pagerank is. Who wouldn’t buy a cheap pagerank 7 site?

The problem is that the seller isn’t always right - and most of the times they know it. They use a technique to have the Google toolbar show another websites pagerank for the website they are trying to sell. So how can you determine whether or not the pagerank is real?

The technique is to have Google believe that the domain is another website. This can be done with redirects on the domain pointing to a high pagerank website. I won’t go into details since others have already done so.

You can check if a website is showing another websites pagerank by going to Google and enter the domain name in the search form. Note that you should check the exact domain - including the subdomain - of the site where you see the pagerank. That means that you have to enter www.example.com if that is the URL shown in the address bar.

When you do that Google will return a result showing the title, “description” and URL for the site that the search engine sees as the website for the URL. This URL needs to be exactly like the URL you entered in the search form e.g. www.example.com. If it shows another URL it means that the pagerank you see in the toolbar is most likely belonging to the that site, and not the one for sale.

The next time you’re valuating a website based on its pagerank. Check if the pagerank is real and that it is not likely to drop after the next update.

Tags: website pagerank, link popularity, fake pagerank, pagerank scam

Entry Filed under: Guides and Tips