This week, we explain how webmasters can fake the PageRank of their websites and how you can spot these fake sites.

In the news: a new open source search engine tries to be better than Google, web surfers ignore ads and a study shows that people tend to trust Google more than they should.

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Although most professional search engine optimizers agree that the green PageRank display has little to do with the actual performance of a website in Google and other search engines, many webmasters still focus on websites with a high PageRank when it comes to link building and website promotion.

How to fake the PageRank of a website

The PageRank of a web page can be faked with a combination of a 301 redirect and cloaking. It works like this:

• When a search engine spiders visits a web page URL, the server redirects the spider to a web page with high PageRank.
  
  
• Google assigns the high PageRank to the page with the redirection because it thinks that the pages are identical.
  
  
• When a human web surfer visits the web page URL, the server does not redirect the surfer. That means that the web surfer sees the web page of the faker and the Google toolbar displays the PageRank of the redirected URL:

To web surfers, it looks as if the web page has a very high PageRank although it hasn't. Note that this method doesn't increase the rankings of the page in any way. It just influences the PageRank display in Google's toolbar.

Google doesn't like cloaking at all so you risk the rankings of your website if you use the method above.

How to check if a website has a faked PageRank

If you think that a web page might have a faked PageRank then you can do the following simple check:

• Search Google for "info:domain.com" (without the quotation marks, replace domain.com with the domain that you want to check).
  
  
• If there are no results or if the returned URLs don't match the original URL then it's likely that the PageRank has been faked. If Google returns only one URL for the query and if the URL is the same as the checked URL then the PageRank is okay.

What about the PageRank of your own website?

The green pixels in Google's toolbar are not important. It's important that your website has high rankings for keywords that convert to sales. Website promotion is about getting leads and sales. It's not about getting green pixels.

Don't focus on the PageRank display in Google's toolbar but try to get good rankings for keywords that are relevant to your website. High rankings for relevant keywords that convert to sales are much better than having a lot of green pixels.

"We want to build a fair ranking system where everyone gets an input into the rankings. If you think a site doesn't belong, you can mark it as spam. If you find a site that is better then what is showing as the best then you can sign up and invest in it. [...]

We think current search rankings were too static, while the web isn't."

In Google we trust: users' decisions on rank, position, and relevance

"An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. [...]

This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web."

Eyetracking shows web audience ignores ads

"A newly released eyetracking study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows that online banner blindness is worsening. Nielsen says that banner ads (indicated by green outlines in his heat maps below) didn’t even receive light focus from skimmers, scanners and readers—and neither did non-ad content in the same areas."

Search engine newslets

• Does Yahoo Search hold the key to online spending?
• Microsoft releases experimental search site Tafiti.
• Google result thumbnail.
• See an SEO doodle in Google AdWords results.
• Baidu spanks Google in China's online ad market.
• Forget iPhone, the Gphone is here.
• Web search IPO stalls on underwriter doubts.
• Corrupted DMOZ editors?
• Google may start New York transit guide to boost ads.

"We rank top in our state searches"

"Bands are a dime a dozen. However, to be popular among searches your site has to stand out. The Great Imponderables not only soared for their local area, but rank top in our state searches. Even more impressive is how we rank for general search terms.

IBP was instrumental in seeing how we compared with other similar sites. As a result, we were able to develop our page to achieve top rankings. Now, if the band itself can do the same..."
Rick Creel, The Great Imponderables

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