Beware Of Pagerank Scams!
Ok, I know this is not new, it has been happening for a while now, but it really pisses me off. While surfing eBay today I found a “bargain” domain for sale with a pagerank 7 and 300 backlinks. Woohoo! If I buy this domain I can retire tomorrow, because the traffic and the money will be rolling in! NOT!
Although the site was 5 years old, it had only 2 incoming links (not 300) and no Alexa rank. I know older sites can rank higher because of trustrank etc. but the fact that this site is on eBay with bidding at $9,50 and no reserve is all to suspicious. Who in his right mind will selll a domain with a pagerank 7 for pennies?? I wouldn’t!
Anyway, I used a couple of seotools that all confirmed the pagerank 7. So I Googlegoogled pagerank scam and found a great tool on seologs.com which confirmed my suspicions: the pagerank is false. Now, why did all the other tools tell me the pagerank was valid? I’m not going to tell you how pagerank scam exactly works, but it basically fools Google into thinking a low page ranking website is at the address of someone elses high ranking website.
This is just another warning to anybody buying a domain from either eBay(or other domainauction sites), from forums or wherever: do some thorough checking on the claims the seller makes! I have found some great domains on eBay, but remember the old saying: if something sounds so good to be true, it usually is.
Ps: I will put some of those tools on my site and will report this seller to eBay.
