Page Rank Theft

[Ceres]

JohnMu.com reports how hackers are stealing page rank.

It's common for hackers to redirect users to a different site. Another angle of attack is to redirect only search engine crawlers:

By doing this, they can make it look like the pages of a website moved to a new domain name. In general, when search engines find redirects like that, they will more or less pass the “value” that a page had on to the new URL — that generally also applies to PageRank. So in a sense, they are trying to steal the value that a webmaster has built up over time.

In this particular case, a “massive amount” of sites were hacked and likely redirected through suomi.co.in.

To find out if this is happening to you, John Mueller recommends that you search your site with a search engine crawler's user agent:

1. Use an online tool such as Web-Sniffer. It’s pretty easy to use and is somewhat close to an actual crawler.

2. Use FireFox with the User Agent Switcher plugin. If you use this plugin, you’ll have to add the user agent yourself. I usually use the current Googlebot user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +Verifying Googlebot - Webmaster Help Center)

Note: if you use Firefox for this, make sure that your Firefox installation is up to date and locked down properly in case you run into a site serving malware like this. Sometimes it even makes sense to use a virtual machine for this.

3. (I wish there were a half-”li” ) There’s also “wget”, which is easy for those of you who prefer use console tools. I usually use the above user agent string with wget.

[Postman]

This is something new. I never know that page rank can be stolen. I only know that they could be cheated by showing other’s sites page rank.