When you are exchanging or buying links on webmaster forums such as Digital Point you should be careful not to get screwed. There are many webmasters that continuously try to enrich them selfs by nailing guys like you and me. Exchanging or buying links can help to improve your rankings when done right. When someone offers you a backlink from for example a PR5 website always check if his PR isn’t fake. Don’t rely on the green bar in your browser as it can be faked easily.
Few tips on discovering fake PR websites:
- Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to get an basic idea of the genuiness of the claimed Pagerank. By checking amount of links in Yahoo! you will be able to filter out most of the fake PR websites. When a website with PR5 has only 100 inbound links, most from blogs (comments), then you can be sure it’s fake.
- Use Google to query the website’s URL and check if the cache of the website correspond with the actual website. Fake Pagerank is mostly achieved by 301 redirecting domain to a genuine PR website, after Google updates it’s visual PR the redirected domain gets the Pagerank of that website. Off course it’s only the visual Pagerank that is transfered, those websites have no value for SEO at all.
- Check the reputation and iTraders of the person you want to exchange links with, if he screwed someone before he will probably have a negative note on his account.
- Don’t rely only on tools that claim to be able to discover fake PR. Those tools can also be fooled easily.