Fake PageRank

One of this site's most interesting tools didn't check your PageRank — it checked whether a site's PageRank was real. In the 2000s, faking a high PageRank was a genuine con, and knowing how it was done is still one of the best lessons in spotting inflated authority anywhere on the web.

The redirect trick

The classic fake-PageRank scam abused the way the Toolbar looked up scores. A low-value page would be set up to 302-redirect — a "temporary" redirect — to a genuinely high-PageRank URL, often a page on a famous site. Because of a quirk in how PageRank was attributed through those temporary redirects, Google's toolbar could end up displaying the target's high score for the sneaky page. To a casual observer, a worthless site suddenly appeared to carry the authority of a major brand.

Why anyone bothered

The motive was money. In the link-buying economy of the era, a page's advertised PageRank set the price of a link or a directory listing. If a scammer could make a junk page show a fake PageRank of 7, they could sell links from it at a premium to buyers who didn't know better. Fake PageRank was, in short, counterfeit currency for the link market.

How a fake-rank checker caught it

A fake PageRank checker compared two things that should have matched: the PageRank the toolbar reported for a URL, and the identity of the page Google had actually indexed and cached for it. If a page claimed a high score but Google's real index showed the value belonged to a different URL — the redirect target — the mismatch gave the game away. The tool essentially asked, "does this score really belong to this page, or is it borrowed?"

Spotting fake authority today

Public PageRank is gone, but inflated and faked authority absolutely is not — it just wears new clothes. The same skeptical instinct applies to the metrics that replaced it. Watch for these red flags:

• A high authority score with almost no traffic. Real authority usually brings visitors. A big "Domain Rating" attached to a site nobody visits often signals manipulated links.
• A backlink profile built from spam. Thousands of links from unrelated, low-quality sites can inflate a third-party score without reflecting any genuine trust.
• Expired-domain trickery. A common modern equivalent of the redirect scam is buying an old domain that earned real authority years ago and repurposing it for something unrelated, hoping the inherited metrics still impress.
• Scores that can't be corroborated. If one tool shows sky-high authority but every other signal — traffic, rankings, brand recognition — disagrees, trust the weight of evidence, not the single flattering number.

A concrete example

Picture a brand-new, worthless page with no real links. Its owner points it, via a temporary 302 redirect, at a well-known university's homepage that carries a genuine PageRank of 8. Thanks to the redirect quirk, the Google Toolbar could display an 8 for the junk page. To a casual link buyer it looked like a golden opportunity: a "PR8" site selling links cheaply. In reality the page had no authority to pass at all — the score was borrowed scenery. A fake-rank checker exposed the trick by revealing that the value truly belonged to the university's URL, not the page claiming it. The same skeptical cross-check — does this number match everything else I can see? — still protects you today.

The enduring lesson

Fake PageRank is a perfect reminder that any authority metric can be gamed, and that a number is only as trustworthy as the data beneath it. Whether it's an old green bar or a modern authority score, always ask where the figure comes from and whether the rest of the picture backs it up. Our guide to checking a website's authority puts that healthy skepticism to work.