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So you have your eyes set on what you consider a prize domain name for your new website, and to your luck it seems to already have a pretty high PR. Before you rush out and buy that domain name, do some homework first to make sure everything checks out. Falsifying a sites PR is not as hard as people may think. Lets say the domain name you are looking at has a PR of 5 which is not to bad really, but how do you know it is legit. The quickest way is just do a search for www.yourdomain.com into google and check the cache site. If the URL’s do not match up then there is a strong chance that site has a fake PR. This is not 100% accurate, as no PR checking tool out there can ever claim to be 100% because we do not know what steps google takes to fully determine a sites PR. An instance of a site cache not matching up and still be legitimate is if the user has used a 301 redirect for that domain name in recent weeks.

So how do people actually fake there PR? With cloaking of course! You take your favorite cloaking script and you can use this code below. I do not take credit for this code as a co-worker of mine gave it to me. All in all still nice to know how it all works.

<?php
/* insert a cloaking script here to detect whether the visitor is
Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo ‘<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.google.com/”>’;
exit();
}
else {
echo “<p>My page!</p>”;
}
?>

This trick has been around for quite sometime now, but I bet most people were unaware of how this all works and really how quick and easy it is to check a site for potentially have a fake PR. People will use this technique quite often when trying to sell a domain name to people in hopes for a much higher price. The higher the PR, the better the domain is suppose to be. Most experienced domainers know of this already, however people new to the industry might be unaware of this.

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