Too high PR for competing sites

[genich99]

I am an affiliate in a competitive gambling industry. Kind of thinking to do something on the Greek market. When making a research bumped into some weird high PR issues.

On a keyword 'καζίνο' ('casino' in greek), when searching on google.gr at least 3-4 of the affiliate portals in the top 10, have PR 7 and 8.

It would very difficult to believe that a site in Greek, built on wordpress, without a significant amount of content, no hardcore links, will reach a PR 6 rankings since the most popular English gambling portals don't get it. But PR8? Can you please give your opinion?

[tedster]

no hardcore links

That's the telling factor here. PageRank depends completely on links to the page - including the PR of the linking pages. Keywords don't enter into the PR calculation, content doesn't enter into the PR calculation, language doesn't enter the PR calculation - not in any way.

There is one relatively hidden factor - a 301 redirect from another domain can transfer established PageRank to the target page.

But I'd say you are right to be suspicious. Over the years, some website owners have discovered ways of tricking the Google toolbar to display unnaturally high PageRank. You can find earlier discussions about it here by doing a Site Search [webmasterworld.com] here for "fake PageRank", "false Page Rank" and so on.

[tedster]

Here's another thought - when a website does manage to trick the toolbar into displaying a PR that is not true, that still does NOT trick Google into ranking the website any higher. It's just lipstick on a pig, - underneath the way things look, Google still sees (and ranks) the pig itself.

So whether the PR you see is faked in some way or not, other factors are in play that are causing Google to rank these pages in the top ten. If you can't find good backlinks, then I would suspect there are some strong 301 redirects in play.

[edited by: tedster at 8:00 pm (utc) on Jul 24, 2010]

[nomis5]

"lipstick on a pig" - like that loads!

I agree and forget page rank entirely, it's a red herring, probably with lipstick on it as well.