Guys, Lately i have seen this board's quality is degrading with useless replies giving totally irrelvant and wrong information to newbies. When new members come to our forum and post about a topic. I assume they are very new to this whole game and expect a honest reply. However members just give totally wrong info and confuse them more. Let me start giving some info on how to find out if any site is banned or got a penalty or has a fake PR. You can get all this information with some simple queries without needing any special tool: 1) Banned Site: It's assumed that the site was listed in google (Dont check new unlisted sites lol) If the site is banned, it wont appear in google at all. So just go to google and type This will show no results. This simply confirm a BAN. If the site has any results, it means its NOT BANNED. 2) Google has dropped my pages, why? Ask yourself a few questions: a) Do you have a good internal linking structure. Its preferred to have all pages linked from Homepage. Blogs typically has Archive facility. b) Did you add a new affiliate link and forgot to add "nofollow". Its important to add "nofollow" to affiliate links. Google identify these links as affiliate spam or link farming in some cases. c) Check in Webmaster central, if any url is restricted by robot.txt and make changes accordingly. 3) I want to buy a website, how do i verify if the site has Real or Fake PR? People always tell you to check via tools or websites. No need to do that, just go to google and type If the results give exact same results then its REAL PR, if it shows different URL, then its a fake redirected PR. Hope this guide helps newbies! I will make more such guides on different topics if you guys wish to read. Reps appreciated!
Absolutely, people tell newbies 10 different tools to check stuff when there is no need for such tools.
Thanks for the information about nofollow. I hadn't even thought about it, but I do have plenty of affiliate links without the nofollow tag, and it might be the reason why some of my newer pages take so long to get indexed.
I dont agree with the way to find fake PR for a domain. There is only one true way to do it and that is by doing it manually. If you dont take the extra steps then you will end up getting screwed. Your method does not account for links that are no longer present which is the biggest reason there is fake PR being shown for domains.
aaron, Links not present has nothing to do with my method. info:domainname method just checks for re-direction. Whats up with the links? What are you referring to? your yahoo method is not necessary when you can clearly check a fake PR in google. Why bother yahoo when you get all your answers in google?
Thanks for your input Godmode. Indeed, for beginners, like myself, it is pretty complicated. Maybe a beginners section in the forum might be appropriate. ________ http://photo4u.awardspace.com/
A high percent of domains with fake PR that are dropped domains are from links being removed. Has nothing to do with redirects. What happens is a domain will be dropped, the links that were going to that site will remove the links. They dont want to link to a site that is gone. The PR will still remain until next updated. With no more incoming links the PR will shoot down to 0. So its therefor not a valid PR for that domain. You MUST MUST MUST check this or you will get screwed. This is the ONLY way to check for fake PR domains. If you use a tool or a shortcut it will not be accurate.
aaron, what you just explain is not a alternate method but a totally different view point. I agree with your point but that doesn't take anything off from google info: command. Your point is however valid in regards to dropped domain. I know these days its big business scamming people with stupid dropped domain crap.
Aaron and godmode, you are both right, and one must do both of your proposed methods before acquiring a domain that pretends to have a PR. You are talking about 2 different faking methods though. Godmode refers to the .htaccess redirecting of a website. Here's how it works: you buy a domain name, you do a 301 redirect of the User Agent googlebot to a big PR page, either with .htaccess, either with php (you add a header(â€HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanentlyâ€); header("Location: big-PR-page.com"); at the top of the page, before anything is displayed, of course after verifying that it is googlebot that gets redirected). So googlebot will index that page instead of yours and you will get its pagerank. It's a fake pagerank because after you remove the .htaccess or php code, you will have your normal PR, even though the toolbar shows a big PR (toolbar PR is updated about 3-4 times a year...that's the reason) On the other hand, aaron talks about an expired domain name, with valid pagerank that is being re-bought. The webmasters that had links pointing to the expired domain might have removed them by the time it was re-bought, so you should check the links that still point to that domain, because obviously, the drop in backlinks will reflect a drop in page rank. So, one should do both of godmode and aaron's verifications before buying a domain name. A very useful tutorial for newbies, godmode, rep added.
Thanks Dwaighty. Thanks for the 301 redirect explanation. Aaron mentioned some very good points for dropped domains. Even in DP forums, there are many scammer trying to sell dropped domain as high PR domains..lol. Some newsbie buy and later cry forever.