Protection against PR-Cheaters

So you are saying that only the DigitalPoint Back Links Tracking tool is showing wrong readings of PR?

www.emuvortex.net Google 2,120 8 1,040 Apr 25, 2005 Disable

So maybe that tool needs fixing ?

 

Thank you Shawn!

This fully answers my question - I know, I should have had more faith in your coding - I hope you can forgive me, but I do like to understand how the system works to be sure that I am not screwed by someone abusing it!

 

;-) the power of the co-op

never fear shawn is here lol.

thnx shawn.

 

Better luck next time, cheater...

 

If I was intentially cheating, that would do me no good now, since I would be "busted" and it would be wise to fix this promptly in hope to remain in the network... but I am seriously stumped here... for those who do not believe me here, just "play along"...

My base weight is, and has been from DAY1, 40,000 (roughly).... now, if this PR cheat is benefitting me in any way... then it must have been from the very beginning because I have seen no changes in my weight.

If Shawn has any logs of the weight changes made over the months (which I'm really hoping he does at the moment), he can verify this to be true... Or, this could mean that I've been "cheating" the whole time (man, I guess I'm pretty tricky). I do not have a strong understanding of how the PR, etc all works to calculate my weight, but take the time to look at Google, see how many pages I have stored in its database. I place 5 Co-op ads per page on my site. Try to calculate the weight yourself, see what it should be...

Still clueless guys (or pretending to be?)

 

Shawn has already stated that for Co op purposes you are not showing at the higher PR.

If you are telling the truth (and to be honest, I have no opinion one way or the other, only you know for sure), it's best to find out why and how it happened and fix the problem. You could be banned from google for this, which is a bigger problem imho.

 

This means that I am recieving the weight that I should despite this event?

- As for trying to figure this out, the fact that it is the same for my forum.emuvortex.net as it is for www.emuvortex.net, I would think that there would have to be something besides just PHP doing this. htaccess, perhaps... redirecting GoogleBot only and only if its at the highest possible public directory "/". If there was such a .htaccess file, it has to be parent to the one I store in public_html, as I have one there where I use for rewrites, etc...

I can think of one thing, actually, that might be the reason for all of this. A different admin manages the domain for the site. He does not ever change the name servers when we change host. What he does is change the record to point the domain (and subdomains) to a particular IP. This would allow for instant changes (rather than waiting for DNS to propagate), as well as the ability to mirror our site (having different sections hosted on different servers while still under the same domain).

I have not even discussed the co-op program with this admin, and I doubt he even knows its on our site. As I've previously stated, I'm the one dealing with the site developement and SEO. I do not see why he would intentially do this for the purpose of PR cheating. If this happened, which I still do not see happening, it would have been accidental, and momentarily (no more than a day).

Thoughts?

edit - is there any way to see how long google has been thinking my page is caminobrowser?

 

Lets just say Google still thinks you are caminobrowser. (One of Google's spiders got Camino site when looking at your index on Apr 26)
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:http://www.emuvortex.net
This is Google's cache -> retrieved on 26 Apr 2005 02:18:09 GMT.

EDIT: or maybe not (depends on Google server & spider you look at)
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:SYwkSyE6OvEJ:www.emuvortex.net

...so no way of telling when it started...

 

First, joncom, learn to ignore the twaddle that comprises posts by fryman --he really doesn't have anything to say that isn't insulting and designed to make him feel better by putting someone else down.

Second, I just got the cache of your actual site in Google following aPRentice's second link above: http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:SYwkSyE6OvEJ:www.emuvortex.net -- however, when I then clicked on the link to the actual site, I get this:

whois.sc shows a thumbnail of the correct site as of "Image updated 2005-02-20". It also shows this:

theplanet.com is a notorious haven for hackers and viruses/zombies -- my advice is get the hell out of there and find a host that actually cares about who else you are sharing the servers with.

As Wendy says, you need to determine whether there is a problem with your .htaccess file or some other redirect from your site, or whether this is something that has happened off-site, because this is obviously not just a problem for the coop.

It needn't be anything that he has done intentionally -- but step one is to have him look at the nameservers and make certain there are no errors there, and then to contact the host for your site and find out what is going on there.

 

Sorry, I need more coffee, obviously... still waking up

This isn't a nameserver problem, obviously, since if I type in http://www.emuvortex.net I get taken to the correct site (with the above-noted error message).

MSN Search also correctly shows thumbnails for emuvortex.net

So it seems like a Google problem -- have you contacted Google to notify them of this problem?

 

Unbelievable: Someone objected to my posting the above "apology"? Peo-ple... this is just getting too stupid...

 

Here is another site give fake PR8 and interestingly this site also use PR8 from same http://caminobrowser.org/ site. This may help to find where is error and so on.
The site is http://www.desitwist.com and here Google see it http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=http://www.desitwist.com&btnG=Search



Interestingly, site is listed to sell PR8 links in 'Link broker site' (somebody sent me screen shot, here http://easytool.org/fakeprsite.htm )and promoting like this
' we have a google pagerank of 8, which is industry high, .....'

 

Good find. Well that is bad, selling links as PR8.

I have no reason to believe joncom has bad intentions but it'd be interesting to know who's behind that desitwist site.

 

Yes, I think this is a common problem some where affecting several site, but some get fortune and soon start to sell links. As you see there are links in lower left side in that site, probabale victims of fack PR.

 

Is the desitwist site not part of the Co-op network?

 

Using google API is really hard to CHEAT ( site: command ) ! because ok you have like 1 page index with a pr 8 SO WHAT you get like 30 WEIGHT thats is nothing, YOU Can't do with 30 weight you'll get half an add a day. Google won't index 400k PAges that are the same
AND ANOTHER THING !
If he did get 400k site the cheater and it is a PR8 and google scans its site and it is still INDEX the pages GOOD FOR HIM ! we gain form it .

 

You've added an extra 0... its 40k

 

This is something that crossed my mind when I saw other reports of Fake PR10 sites and sites scamming people buying text-links. Thinking it would be easy enough to set up a redirect for googlebot on the home-page (or the page used as the root URL for co-op ads) to a high PR site, and also have a decent amount of pages indexed in google by deeplinking, to a sitemap for example.

It's easy enough to see what's going on by entering the URL into google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=http://www.emuvortex.net

clearly shows what's going on.

As jon loch pointed out, this isn't true - as can be seen here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.emuvortex.net

There is no reason you can't have the rest of your site indexed and only the home-page redirected to a high PR site.

Another consideration I'd like to mention - what if the trickster redirected to another co-op site with high page-rank and lots of pages indexed, would that fool the system? I would hope not.

I'm sure Shawn has taken the necessary precautions to catch this sort of BS.

As for the site-owners explanation - This stuff doesn't happen by accident, if you didn't do it - then someone else with access to your server did. Didn't you wonder why your site suddenly jumped to PR8? I know you don't care what I think, but given the choices:
a) you're trying to cheat
b) your server got hacked and the hacker decided to redirect your home-page to a high PR site only for googlebot.

I'm sure everyone can draw their own conclusions....