Have you ever gone to a website and wondered how in the world it got that Google Pagerank of 4 that your Google Toolbar is showing? Well, chances are, it didn’t. Rogue webmasters have found ways to fake a website’s Pagerank and fool the toolbar. This trick is especially common with scam artists that sell websites by making the buyer think that it has a higher PR than it really does.

Unfortunately, getting the Google Toolbar to show an incorrect PR is not very hard. Webmasters create a 301 redirect header that only affects Googlebot. So when your toolbar tries to find the PR for a website, the 301 redirect sends Googlebot to a different website and it returns the Pagerank for that site. Before you ever buy any links or website based on its PR, there are several websites you can visit to find out the actual PR for any site. Live.ezer.com is one that I’ve used often. Be careful who you trust online…a second opinion never hurts :).