Here’s how we found it …….

A little while back the page rank on one of our sites was reduced from 4 to 3. Not a huge deal as did not seem that SERPs were affected.

We had hoped the PR would move up to 5 because of all the new links we had garnered, but perhaps we’d lost some also. Or perhaps we’d been penalized along with a number of other sites who saw an artifical drop.

There was no way to tell and no point in losing too much sleep over it.

Some time after, our article directory, was shut down by the hosting company for using too much MSQL resources.

To ensure we made best use of the article directory traffic while we found another host and article directory script, we redirected the article directory traffic (using a 301 redirect) to that of the site above.

About a month went by. In that time we found a suitable host & fired up the new article directory script.

When we checked the PR of the Article directory, it was showing as PR4. Furthermore the Google back links for the article directory were the same as for the other site.

A couple of online PR checkers showed the PR of the article directory to be fake.

Hmmm – may have found something here.

Maybe the PR shown on the pagerank servers is different to that shown internally within Googles systems. That might explain why SERPS don’t seem to be affected on penalized sites.

So it came to pass, Brian’s home grown method to measure the page rank penalty for a site.

• Grab an unused domain. Preferably with zero PR.
• 301 redirect that domain to the site you wish to do a penalty check.
• Wait until all the backlinks in the penalized site are the same as those for the redirected site.
• Wait for the next PR update.
• Check the two PR’s, the difference is your penalty.

Would be interested in your thoughts. Is this co-incidence or can this test be reliably be applied to other sites ?