Fake Page Rank

Can webmasters cause "fake" page rank to display?

[crobb305]

This may seem like a stupid question but I thought I had seen a previous post where someone had discovered that the page rank displayed for a particular site was fake--that the webmaster somehow was able to manipulate what was shown in the toolbar (maybe through a redirect or something). If this is possible, how can I detect that it is happening?

Thanks!

[korkus2000]

It is a feed from google. A frameset would be the only way to fool the page rank. You will get the PR for the site that is in the address bar.

[ciml]

> If this is possible, how can I detect that it is happening?

Check the cache. If the cache for widget-multi-hyphen-domain.com says "This is G o o g l e's cache of [yahoo.com...] then it's probably not PR10 after all.

With the amount of Fresh listings nowadays it's less hard to spot as you might get the Fresh cache, not the cache from when the PR was calculated.

Can anyone work around that problem?

[Powdork]

I recently posted about a directory that uses frames. The frameset consists of the entire page so you can't easily tell its using frames. That way, each page you visit has the same pr 7 as the home page from the toolbar's point of view. In this case you can right click on the page and hit properties to find the page's url (rather than that of the frameset). Cut and paste it into your address bar and see the page's rank.

[Chris_R]

I tried doing it as a joke on the page in my profile.

I don't have the skills to make the other toolbar disappear - so it isn't like I am fooling anyone.

[Deodato]

Nice site, Chris_R. Brett's guidelines were good, but I had to read 50 things and you sum it all up in 10! I like the pretty colors too.