Webmasters who manipulate/falsify PR

[DXL]

I get an reciprocal link exchange email today, the site's homepage is PR4 and the link page in question shows as PR4 in Explorer 5.5.

For some reason, my google toolbar never shows the correct PR for any site or page, so I also use a site with a built in PR checker to obtain numbers. It showed that his homepage is PR4, but the links page is PR0. So I'm wondering if this guy fiddled with the site to make every page show up as PR4 in the toolbar, but maybe this PR checker caught it? Is there a concrete way of determining the page PR? Why does my i.e. toolbar never work accurately?

[Artstart]

Is there something like "iframe" on that page?

[DXL]

It doesn't appear to be in frames or have iframes, and the source code doesn't reflect that its in frames. I had initially checked the page properties in different places to see if maybe that was the culprit, but it seems to be all one page.

[Artstart]

There was a recent PR update and sites' PR value was jumping up and down. May be that was the reason.

[The_Banker]

If someone did falsify Pagerank, they surely would get caught. So why take the risk, it's nuts.

[DXL]

Well someone posted in another thread a while back that they falsified their own PR. The purpose was to either sell the site name to someone, or to obviously encourage others to do link exchanges. I would imagine that if they got caught after selling the domain name, they could probably say the immediately loss in PR wasn't their fault, if they did a link exchange, I imagine the worst that could happen would be that they would lose the link (and someone would contact their link partners). But if they falsified PR, I guess they would know the risks.

[sugarrae]

It is possible to fake pagerank [webmasterworld.com] but I'd imagine most of the methods would kill the site. Of course, for those basing linking decisions solely on pagerank (which you should never do) it is likely bring in cash for the faker - he is likely doing it for the text link buys than actual ranks in the engines. However, based on what you mentioned, I'd be more likely to blame the toolbar flux I've been seeing as of late (when using I.E.). I'd base your decision on the site's merit, popularity, quality and their ability to send you visitors and not on what their pagerank is. My two cents anyway...

[DXL]

Well there's someone on ebay selling text links on a PR8 site, but the site is less than two years old (a directory). I had debated on buying a link because the price seemed pretty sweet, but there's a PR checker on another site I ran the URL through, and it seems that they are doing a redirect to Valueclick (which is PR8). I guess the people buying from him won't know they were ripped off.