How Webmasters Fake Their Google PR – Avoiding the Fake Google Page Rank Link Exchange Scam

March 28th, 2010 → 12:23 pm @ Clay (The BDD Dude)

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Beware of “Too Good to Be True”Link Exchanges with High PR Websites

Once your website establishes a decent PR you’ll start to attract some very shady people. Among the worst are the fake Google PR scam artists. Besides being deceitful, they also put a black eye on the entire SEO industry, so I take it personally.

These fake PR scams all follow the same pattern. You’ll receive an email from a person who claims to have a high PR (PageRank) site, usually PR4 or PR 5, and they want to do a link exchange with you. But this is not some lowly free-for-all link exchange page they are offering. They’re offering a home page or even a site-wide blogroll link in exchange  for one single home page link from you. What a great deal! However, you won’t be linking to their page in return, you be linking to another one of their sites that they’d like to send some link juice to. The three-way link exchange is an SEO industry standard practice so that request seems perfectly normal as well. The trouble is it’s all fake. It’s a scam. And here’s how it works.

The domain in question has usually just been registered by a new owner, perhaps less than a month ago. It’s an established domain, but the current content and the registered owner is brand new. The Google PR toolbar does indeed show the same PR as promised (I use the free  SearchStatus extension for Firefox) but when you do a Google search using “info:mydomainname.com” Google shows information for a completely different page. It could be an older and irrelevant version of the site or even a completely different domain. The scams use one of two techniques.

Buy an Expired High PR Domain and Trade Links Before Google Wipes the Old PR Clean.

Here’s how this one works. You snatch up an expired PR5 website and quickly throw some more content on it. Usually the new content is designed to convince the targeted webmasters the site is highly relevant to their business but usually has no relationship to what the domain’s content was before. Then you contact a bunch of high PR websites and offer three-way link exchanges before Google erases the old PR. If done quickly, you can secure a hundred or so good quality links to your targeted website while providing nearly useless links back in return. Since most webmasters won’t follow up later, they are never the wiser.

Hijack Another Site’s PR with 301 Redirects and Cloaking.

This one involves a form of cloaking where you trick the Google Toolbar into thinking it’s another site. You can learn more about faking Google PR here and here. So while you are looking at the domain in question, your toolbar is fetching PR results from a completely different domain. This is PR hijacking. Either way, both techniques are completely unethical and fraudulent. These aren’t honest mistakes. These are deliberate attempts to deceive. Below is an email I received on March 26th 2010 from these crooks and an explanation of what is really going on.

Here’s the original email:

Note: I was contacted on April 14th  by the owner of the company who is mentioned in the following scam and he apologized and assured me that he didn’t know the company he hired was using these fraudulent tactics. I also believe him because I seriously doubt that this scam SEO outfit is truthful with their clients about their techniques. So I’ve removed his information as a professional courtesy.

Hi,

I have visited your website  claytowne.com   and I was wondering if it
would be possible to get a link to my partner’s website on it?

I’ll place a link back to you in 2 of my Business and Marketing  Guide
website exactly here:

http://commerciallandconsultants.com/  with page rank 4
http://clcnm.org/  with page rank 4

If you agree, then please link to me using these details, I´ll place a
link back in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from
your site:

Title: Online Market Research
URL: (URL removed)
Description: (name removed) is a leading online market research
consultancy.

Please don’t forget to send me the title of your website after you
place my link so I can do the same.

I’ll be waiitng for your kind reply

Regards
Megan Shaw
megan.shaw@commerciallandconsultants.com

Online Marketing Consultant

If we check out the history of the commerciallandconsultants.com domain we can learn a lot. First, we notice that the domain has been advertised as expiring on March 14th and has a PR of 4.

expired domains are prime targets for scammers

Expired domains are prime targets for scammers.

Then by checking the who is database we find that Daniel Silva in Peru purchased it the next day. He owns at least 420 other domains. He’s a prolific spammer and a liar and also the man behind this fake PR link exchange scam.

Domain scammer

Daniel Silva is a scam artist. He uses expired domains and 301 PR hijacking to dupe webmasters into linking to his own or his client's websites.

After acquiring the domain, he puts up a quick bullshit blog, sets up some PageRank 301 hijacks, and then starts spamming his targets. He does this because Google tends to wipe out the old PR once a domain expires. He also made sure his faked PR matched the old sites PR.

Both of these sites have spoofed Google PR. They are using the 301 redirect trick to hijack another website’s PageRank. But how do we know that? We discover this by running an “info” search on Google. We can see who the real PR belongs to and if you check for the cached version you’ll also see the real site.

Faked Google PR Sample

By using the "info:" search on Google we can easily see that clcnm.org is stealing it's PR from ipl.unm.edu./childlaw/

Faked Google PR Sample

By using the "info:" search on Google we can easily see that commerciallandconsultants.com is stealing its PR from coffeeefundraiser.com.

If you visit the sites and look at the sidebars you’ll see that in only two weeks, hundreds of webmasters have already been duped into exchanging their real Google PR links in exchange for faked ones. Since so many exchanges have already taken place it’s obvious that I’m one of the last ones to get this email.

Faked Google PR Link Exhange Scam

By looking at the right sidebar you can see that hundreds of webmasters have already been duped by this scheme. Every single one of these sites gave www.onlinemarketresearch.org.uk a high quality one-way link in exchange for this junk link.

Buyer Beware

So be careful out there. Quality link exchanges are great, if they are real. Most unsolicited (meaning you’ve don’t know the person and have never advertised you’re interested in link exchanges) are probably requests to exchange links with worthless “links page” or are flat-out fraudulent. Do your homework. If the requester is honest and their offer legit, it will still be there tomorrow. If it isn’t, the extra time to research, read, and reflect will only work to your advantage.

File Under: Fake Google PR Scams – Tips for Link Avoiding Bad  Exchanges – How to Check Google PR – Identifying Scam Link Exchanges