I have been looking into PageRank because the topic of fake pagerank has come up over the last little while for us. While it’s easy to find a PHP script that returns PageRank, I have found it pretty challenging to find one that tells you if PageRank has been faked. In the middle of my search (that spanned a couple days), I realized that Google updated their PageRanks yesterday. Google does a massive update of PageRanks every three months or so (beginning of every quarter perhaps?), and when they do it, they recalculate all the PageRanks reported by the toolbar and other PageRank checkers.
So, why am I reporting this? Well, it appears that many of the sites that I came across in my search that reported to have an inflated, fake PageRank have had their PageRank downgraded, most of them to -1 (meaning, it’s not even reported to have a PageRank, as opposed to a PageRank of 0). Is fake PageRank a thing of the past? Only time will tell. One forum I came across had a comment to the effect of “as long as Google keeps finding our blackhat techniues (i.e. faking PageRank), we’ll find ways to get around them”.
Can anybody else verify that Fake PageRank is now dead?