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Check domains for PageRank-depreciations (update)

Today, an interesting possibility of checking domains for PageRank-depreciations has been published in the Abakus-forum. Let us remember that, for more than two years now, Google is trying to fight the sale of links by depreciating the PageRank of the selling site by a few points. By doing so, Google wants to show that links from this domain have no value anymore and that the purchase would not be worthwhile. Due to this, in regular intervals we are presented with a few linksellers that got “caught” and lost PageRank. With this – freshly discovered and rather curious – query, you are able to check whether this has happened to a domain in the past:

When you query the PageRank for the “hyves” subdomain of any domain you will either receive a “7” or a “4”. The seven symbolizes that “everything is all right, the domain was not depreciated” while the four shows that the domain has been classified as a linkseller in the past. I have tried this for a few domains and surprisingly this method really seems to work: Zeit.de, which was depreciated at the beginning of Google taking action, returns a PR4, Sistrix.de, which of course has never and will never sell links, returns a PR7. I ran this test for a larger quantity of domains and picked out 30 interesting domains whose PageRank was apparently depreciated:

#	Domain
1	stern.de
2	golem.de
3	zeit.de
4	berlin.de
5	immowelt.de
6	finanznachrichten.de
7	marions-kochbuch.de
8	erento.com
9	linkarena.com
10	berlinonline.de
11	netzeitung.de
12	heisetreff.de
13	tomshardware.com
14	taz.de
15	ksta.de
16	winfuture.de
17	shareware.de
18	basicthinking.de
19	koeln.de
20	sz-online.de
21	digitalkamera.de
22	unicum.de
23	haz.de
24	stuttgarter-zeitung.de
25	mz-web.de
26	general-anzeiger-bonn.de
27	maerkischeallgemeine.de
28	rundschau-online.de
29	stuttgarter-nachrichte...
30	lr-online.de

a noticeably more comprehensive list of 1.000 domains that were punished can be downloaded by customers of the SISTRIX Toolbox: abgewertete_domains_20090120.csv. For those who are active in linkpurchases linkbuilding, it could be especially interesting to counter-check their sources with the list to make sure they are not making any silly mistakes. More postings on this subject can now be found at Mario, Gerald, Marcus and Bastian.

[update 01.21. 8:00am] This was quick, Google has already fixed the bug that allowed the detection of PageRank-depreciations through this subdomain. Just now, I updated the file with the affected domains again, it has grown to exactly 3219 domains – this shows that in the last few years, Google was surprisingly diligent.