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How To Get More Google PageRank
Published: March 29, 2005
April 30th 2005 - PageRank 10/10
The ethical thing to do is produce an informative and content rich website, then promote your site through the directories to get those all important backlinks, which in turn, through quantity and quality, increase your PageRank.
Well, it seems there's a bug in Googles algorithm that allows you to get any PageRank you desire. All it requires is a simple and temporary 301 redirect in your webservers .htaccess file come PageRank update time.
Tell me how!
Well first, it's wrong to do so. It's a bug that surely will close. Although I have (maybe foolishly) implemented this trick myself to see what happens, I have no care for my PageRank so am willing to test it for my minions. This may wipe my site from Google altogether, it may return to normal after the subsequent PageRank update. Who knows!
So what! Tell me!
First, you create a web page. For example, google.html. Upload the file to your web space then submit this page to Google or even link to it from within your website, whatever it takes for Google to find it.
Then add the following to your .htaccess file.
That's it. If you don't know what a .htaccess file is, it's a plain text file that sits in the root folder of your website on an Apache server. Typically this comes with Linux hosting. Don't try to make the file on Windows as Windows won't allow you to name a file without a name. Create a text file, name it file.htaccess, then upload it. You'll need to rename the file once it's uploaded via an FTP program.
Now what?
In a couple of months time when Google updates it's PageRank, your google.html page will assume the PageRank value of the redirect location, www.google.com which has a value of 10. Yes, your little web page on your website will have a PageRank of 10. Great eh!
Will it benefit my listing position?
I doubt it but it's something I'll be checking.
Where's your high ranked page?
Instead of opting to link to Google which is no doubt the first loop they'll close, I've chosen http://www.statcounter.com which has a 9/10 PR. This very post, in it's individual archive guise is currently redirected to get a 9/10 PR from this site (edit/ the new update gave the source website a PR10 so now this page has a PR10 - whoops!). This means this post can only be read through the front page. Linking directly to it will just throw you to the target of the .htaccess file.
What happens after the update?
Remove the .htaccess file or at least the 301 redirect entry to bask in the glory of your massively ranked web page.
Update
Now this page has a PR10, I'll wait until Google gets around to indexing the content. Once it has, I'll check ranking. I've no idea how long this will last or the effects it will have so we'll see won't we!
Update #2
Well, the content has been indexed and it hasn't shed an unexpected results. Check out the Google results below.
- World: How To Get More Google PageRank - Middle of page 2
- UK: How To Get More Google PageRank - Top of page 1
Still, not bad results by any standards but it doesn't reflect the massive PageRank value. So there you are people, the 301 PageRank trick is nothing more than a story to boast about in the pub.
Update #3
Sometime in June the PageRank was updated to a more realistic 3. Rank hasn't changed much for the phrase so it looks as though the PR trick is just that, a trick, with no added benefit.
At least we know now.
I have setup an example that allows everyone except Googlebot to see the page. Because Googlebot gets sent, via the 301 .htaccess to www.google.com, the PageRank is 10. You can see it at http://labs.tn38.net/high_page_rank/.
Useful?
Assistance?
Comments
Ron Wilson says:
Sugan says:
i am not seeing the PR 10 when i go to the following page,
http://labs.tn38.net/high_page_rank/
does this mean that google has fixed the issue?
whatever be the case, interesting read. thanks for the details.
Tammy says:
I've read google redirect will get you banned for sure as the spiders will find your site's htaccess and blacklist you, anyone have had this issue before?
Cat says:
I have a site that I was asked to build last October. This was the first time that I had to optomize for ranking. The site is crawled by Google quite often, and I have seen it listed under several different keywords and phrases as high as #1 and as low as #50. But the instant i see that Google has crawled my site and I check the searches to make sure I'm listed, my site is no longer listed. This usually takes an hour or so. One minute it's there, and hour later it's gone. I really need some help on this.
Cindy C says:
Ed,
Help! I have been obsessed with my web site ranking for a number of years. I have always been on the first page of google search but in the past 2 weeks have dropped slowly off the map. I have made a few changes, 1. redid my website and optimized with better meta, and still ranked first page of google.
2. I had pages that google pointed to that would soon be gone, so I made page redirects, still ranking up there.
3. Over the past month I have had some/lots of spamming of my web address, returned mail of about 15 to 20 a day. Non of these emails are sent by me, however they appear something like: From:
"Christine Powell" ggqnhwyszx@greenvaleacres.com
and they are all from different IPs.
I don't see a problem but sometimes if your inside the box you can't see out. Now, I was thinking, If a web site was at one time well ranking with google and it dropped off, I mean pages that were indexed are not any longer, could this web site be put into this sandbox effect. How new does a web site have to be? My web site is 6 years old, however the newest pages and many new content pages were all added Feb of 2006.
Any help or suggestions would be sooooooo much help at this time.
Thank you in advanced
cindy
Matt Cutts says:
Even if you were able to make it look like high PageRank in the toolbar PageRank display, you wouldn't really have high PageRank in Google's internal system. The idea of doing a 301 to try to make a page that has high PageRank would at most get you fool's gold, in that it might look pretty but couldn't affect ranking at all.
Lydia W says:
Hi, I found this page by searching for "does googlebot read pages redirected through 301." It was in the first page of results.
I recently created a site completely in flash (the client asked me to and then realized search engine implications after it was finished) and have been looking for legit ways to get the content to google without being penalized. One thing I tried was building an html only version of the site with all the text and links back to the other pages and setting those files to redirect back to the flash site through a 301 on .htaccess. It's my understanding google can't access .htaccess but who really knows... I also used SWFobject to "embed" my flash without breaking standards and that allows you to place alt text content, which is replaced by flash.
After a bunch of research this seemed like the best thing to do for a flash site, but it seems too easy. Hackers and spammers could get away with this just as easily. I just wish google was able to read swf content reliably and then I wouldn't be forced to hack things =(
Will this get you banned from Google if they catch you?