I though’t I’d share a neat little idea with you.
I published this site a week or so ago and straight away it has a PR5 (on the homepage). Yeah, big deal… who obsesses about toolbar PR nowadays? Even if you’re not too concerned about such things, who’s going to punch a gift-horse in the face with such an easy win?
I’ll explain…
I bought this domain a year or so ago, and for want of time or inclination, decided to point it at my twitter URL http://twitter.com/nicholastott and let it fester there for a good long while.
Many of you may know that I tweet a lot. I use twitter to notify my followers as to content I’ve written and I also like to re-tweet great content from my followers. If my content is picked up and referenced people may drop an @mention to the above mentioned URL. I also drop my twitter URL everywhere I go online, like a big phat digital footprint. All of this means that over time and quite organically my twitter page has a TB PR of 5.
When I finally got around to launching this blog it appears to have carried with it the accrued value and trust from the twitter page it has thus far been pointed to.
Of course, with just a couple of handfuls of links and less than ten pages of content to date, I’m not too attached to the hope that I’ll retain that PR5, but in the meantime I’ll get around to making it work for me…
19th March 2010 PageRank
SEO Quake Toolbar PR of 5/10 as of March 19th 2010.
This was a great tactic of people who were selling links. Inflated PR to make the site look better, get the links bought and then boom – next PR update it drops.
This is all allegedly and I would never have such a reputation
Great idea, I am currently pointing to my flavors.me profile but a re-shake on a few domains might be in order…
What about possible penalties for duplicate content on different urls? Or is that myth?
@Stuart – Re dupe content – won’t be an ish in such cases as there is only one instance of the content, on twitter – it’s just a pure and simple redirection. In terms of duplicate content, I’m not certain that penalities are the main risk, unless we’re into the realms of unauthorised site-rips. Of main concern is the issue of authority i.e. if the spiders record two instances of the exact same content on or off your own site, then without being able to discern the original authoratative source any attributable PR could be diluted.
@Goosh – people actually sell links? Who’d a thunk it
Nice article Nichola. PR inflating is a common tactic/issue.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons Google is slowly removing PR from the tools and letting the community know not to pay to much attention to it
One question though: did you use a 301 or a 302 for the redirection?
Hi Steven,
That and I’m sure it’s also to try to discourage an aggressive linkbuilding strategy, rather than a community led stratgey. I guess the one follows on from the other.
301.
Have a fab weekend
Very common practice and I have seen it time and time again when buying websites, although some people would 301 to Pagerank 8/9 sites and get found out straight away!
http://checkpageranking.com/index.php?name=http%3A%2F%2Fnicholastott.com%2F&links=1&captcha_code=6s43
Google will soon give you you’re real page rank soon
Hi Keith,
I’m definitely not labouring under any false hopes here. It was more of an amusing side-effect of my procrastinating on launching on this domain.
I like that little pagerank checker tool! Merci.
great post as usual!
Very helpful article.Thank for this.