Fake PageRank scam?

[gamblingau]

Had someone offering to place a link on their site for a monthly fee, claiming their site is PR8 - I checked the PR and it seems to be real, with no 301 redirect, but by looking at the site and their presence in google results, I highly doubt their PR is legitimate, but cannot find out how they faked it, and whether having a link on their site will have a negative effect on my site.

Their domain is articledomination(dot)info

Can anyone shed some lights into this ?

[Keszi]

Hi Tuan Nguyen,

I am usually not biting these kind of meat. I don't like to buy links. Note that one day Google will find these, and will punish them.

The question is, do you want to have any kind of connection with them at that point?

Gr.,

Istvan

[Vizergy]

Hello Tuan,

It is important to remember that the PR you see is just toolbar PR and is not the internal PageRank that Google uses in their ranking formula – no one has access to that.  Their Toolbar PR is high because of their large number of backlinks and content.

In looking at the website you provided the URL for, I see that there are dozens and dozens of completely unrelated, almost random looking, links in the website’s footer.  You do not want to be associated with this website – it will get noticed if it hasn’t already.  It is obvious that they sell links; this is exactly the type of thing Google looks for when hunting for link farms.

Hope this helps,

Vizergy

[Ecreativeworks]

I think you should avoid this place. One easy way to test the quality of a site is to see how they rank for various terms -- this one does not even rank for the name of the site, which is probably a good indication that while they have built a lot of links (thus the PageRank) Google sees them as a spam site.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The PR is legitamate. But the site itself is bad, bad news.

If you check whois, you can see the registration is only a few months old. So how did they achieve such high PR in such a short period of time?

A very smart (and un-named) colleague of mine suggested using spyonweb to check the Google Analytics and Adsense code of this site to see what other sites it was connected to. Looks like it's part of a huge link network all owned or managed by the same people.

(hint - use spyonweb to search for the Google Adsense code "pub-xxxxxxxxx")

Regardless, the site is obviously selling links at the bottom of the page. Although Google doesn't catch all paid links, these are so obvious that anyone who buys them is at huge risk of a penalty. A smart webmaster would be wise to stay away from paid link offers like this.