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The Hyves trick: weirdest story of the year
20.01.2009I think that the following story will be the weirdest story in search of 2009: at the moment it's possible to check if a domain got penalized for selling links just by checking the pagerank of a domain and putting "hyves" in front of that domain (as a subdomain)! This trick was posted in the German Abakus SEO forum this morning.
Practically all you have to do is check the pagerank of hyves.requesteddomain.com. The subdomain "hyves" should not exist!
You can get 3 possible answers:
PR7: everything is okay.
PR4: domain got penalized.
PRO: domain got banned.
So for example if you check the pagerank of hyves.zeit.de or hyves.netzeitung.de (known German linksellers, at least in the past :)) you get PR4. Just check a domain you're sure they never sold links and you will see it gives a PR7.
German SEO Sistrix tested this mysterious trick and released immediately a top 1000 list of penalized domains for the client's of the Sistrix Toolbox and a top 30 for all readers. Marcus "Mediadonis" Tandler shows some examples in his blog.
This is one of the strangest things I ever heard and I'm curious why this trick is working using the name of the most popular social media site in the Netherlands.....Anyone?
Does this work in all countries?
**Update 21/01** Like I expected, Google meanwhile closed this leak. And no, this was not a linkbait of Searchcowboys :)
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