Web Site Page Rank Fakery & Hits vs. Visits Scam
The truth about Page Rank, Website Stats, and how to stay safe

TIP: Never trust a webmaster that will not back up claims of quality traffic with actual data. Always request the past six months of data. They may not have it all, but at least they offered to show you what they do have. If it sounds to good to be true then it usually is.

There are so many areas to consider when one tally's up a websites statistics that give us our Page Ranks and Stats. Before you can even begin to worry about Page Ranks - you need to know more about your website. The question is "why is this website important to you?" Does it provide you with an income? Can you make more money if you knew what was working and what didnt? Do you want to know the stats of a websute because you're looking to advertise on someones website? This list of questions can go on, and there is only one way to answer many of them. ANALYTICS!

If you have a website I suggest heading on over to Google, and sign up with Google Analytics. It will start collecting data on your websites traffic the moment you put their code into your pages. This is the data you need when it comes to the success of your website. It is free and provides sophisticated reports about traffic on your website.

What is a Site Page Rank:
Do you need it? All website owners need to know

If you have not heard of the term "Page Rank" then you could be missing out. If you do not know anything about Page Rank then it's likely you do not know much about search engine optimization. This is not a terrible thing, but starting right now if you continue reading you WILL know enough to move up to bigger and better things.

A website that is not properly optimized is a website that sits at the bottom of the search engine results pages and they typically have a low page rank. Some specialists believe in the importance of having a high page rank, and others do not. The SEO world is divided on this subject so you should be careful and make your decisions based on what you feel is right. Personally I believe it is worth it to work for a high page rank as long as you do it without cheating. High Page Ranks do not come easy, and when you get them legally (white hat techniques) then you truly earned it. In the SEO world there are NO guarantees, and your Page Rank can be dropped at anytime. When and if this does happen you will learn from it, and you again will climb to the top. This is something that no serious site owner would ever give up on.

Let me first tell you what Page Rank is. Page Rank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The Page Rank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. Now that we know what it is and how it works we need to know how PR is scored. Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet; this Page Rank denotes your sites importance in the eyes of Google!

It is very important that you do not rate a web page due to the page rank number that Google has given it. Usually page ranks are higher for the "home page" of a website, and the ranks are lower on the sites sub pages. If you see a web page that has no page rank that doe's not mean it's a bad page, it means that Google simply has not ranked it yet, and that could take months! Page rank grows with a sites age as long as the webmaster keeps the site alive with quality content. This is why keeping your web pages updated is very important.

Page Rank Fakery - Webmasters using tricks to gain High PR.
Warning: Do Not even try to fake out Google because they will catch you!

The next thing you should know is that over time webmasters have found ways to fake out the page ranking system, and some webmasters like to use these unfair methods to gain PR. This is where you ask "How are website owners doing this?" Well, it is pretty simple actually. They do this by redirecting spiders to web sites that have high page ranks so that the data centers will record them as having that high page rank. This is very easy to do, and unfortunately it is done all over the internet today. I will explain this so that you do not make these mistakes.

They do it by Cloaking which is a search engine optimization technique where the page content shown to the search engine spider is different from what is shown to the users. This may get a site banned from search engines so I do not advise anyone to do this. There are legitimate reasons for cloaking, such as optimizing your flash websites for the search engines. However, this may not be as necessary these days.

Why would some cloak that does not have a legitimate reason? cloaking is used to trick the search engine into giving it a higher ranking. However using this can and will get your website(s) banned from the search engines.

Should you do it? The real question is "do you have a reason to do it?" If you have no clue then you do not have a reason to use cloaking. PERIOD.

Why would they want to do this in the first place? Some newbie website owners, or advertisers will go out searching for high ranking websites that offer relevant content. They notice the high ranking webmaster is charging less than average so the newbie thinks they hit the jackpot becase they see the high page rank number and consider it a worthy site to advertise on. They will send the newbie fraudulent statistics and the details on where to send payments to. Once they take your money you won't know if you have been tricked for a while. That is just one reason, and that reason alone is a good enough warning to make sure you research a website very carefully before paying a dime. I want to note that a PR 3 site can be better than a PR 7 site, and of course vice versa. The main point is to make sure you're dealing with the true people and statistics.

Another VERY important point I would like to add about Page Rank and statistic centers. Example if you went to domain tools, Alexa, and most other website stat sites they almost NEVER show the correct statistics. They seem to lag behind anywhere from a few months to year. Example domain tools states this site sees around 12000 unique visits a month. This number is absurd! My site sees five times that and more. We are growing week so whatever alexa and domain tools is saying is absolutely incorrect. So, if you want to consider that information at those types of centers go for it, but the truth will not be known. When visiting those data centers onsider the date to be a year old! Sorry, just had to give my point of view being I watch statistics daily!

 I will state here today that I am 100% legit and proud of it. I like a challenge and will get to the top all on my own without fakery. The truth is that they are looser's in the end because Google will find them and handle them as they see fit (banned usually/hopefully.)

What is your Page Rank?
You should track your PR

The below page rank checking tool will visit the datacenters and list actual page ranks for you. This is a great little tool so that you can check websites yourself. Find out if they are lying about their page ranks, and if they are let someone know about it, but you better be sure. Don't sit back and let some bully beat you up with their loosing attitude!

Fake Pagerank Check Tool
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Visits vs. Hits
Scams and Confusion: First lets talk about the scam so many fall into daily!

If you have not heard of the term "Page Rank" then you could be missing out. If you do not know anything about Page Rank then it's likely you do not know much about search engine optimization.

This page is about fakery and scams so I feel it is important to explain things in detail so that you understand how the scams work. Have you ever found a website that states they will get you thousands of hits if you sign up with them? If you are interested in learning how to market your website then most likely you have heard of these sites. Unfortunately people sign up with them not realizing it is nothing but a scam. Why is it a scam? Let me explain a few things first. You sign up on the premise they promise you traffic.

A few ways to do this.
1. Pay for the traffic: You sign up and pay for traffic. How much you pay depends on how much traffic you want. Just sit back and you will see your hits increase. Where does this traffic come from? Answer: read #3 below.

2. Click for the traffic: You sign up with a system where you click on links to view advertisements. Each advertisement had a point value assigned to hit and you typically do not know what the point value is. Example you see a link about baking bubbles, and you click on it and find out it was worth 1 point. Now you click on a link called yellow pickles and find out it is worth 3 points. You now have earned 4 hits to your website. Where does this system get their links from? Answer: read # 1 above.

3. Pay Per Click traffic:. Have you ever found a website that will pay you 0.01¢ per click if you click on advertisements? Well many people have found those sites and they sign up and click on thirty or so links a day. Earning 0.30¢ a day does not seem to be worth it so what they do to keep you around is offer you a link so that you refer others to sign up under you. Once you have a referral signed up you will earn ½¢ more for each of their clicks. So if you clicked your thirty links and they clicked theirs you now made fifty cents that day. Imagine having 50 active referrals under you. You could end up making an extra $100.00 a month or more this way. This is why people tend to do click away. Again where do they get the links in the first place? Answer: read &1 and #2 above.

Why did I layout this information this way? I wanted to show you that a traffic system that promises you visits is a complicated revolving door that is controlling and confusing you.

What does this have to do with site Hits and Visits?
Would you pay for garbage?

The answer is another question, and the question is "Is the above considered quality traffic?" The answer is NO! That type of traffic is nothing but garbage! The people clicking on the links have no interest in you or your website. They only want to get their penny for the visit. Typically they do not even look at your website because they have programs out there today that will click for them. Is that the type of traffic you were hoping for? If you noticed your hits went up over 3,000 hits, but you knew only 2,995 of them would actually read your web page would you still consider those hits valid? No, I wouldn't and that is why it is important for advertisers to be very careful when choosing a website to advertise on.

NOTE: There are some sites that do benefit from these types of systems, but they typically are scam sites anyway and that is why I will keep to my original claim that it is all a SCAM!

After reading the above are you now thinking more about Visits, Hits, and which one can you trust?

Michele's Paint Shop SEO Newbie 101 is dedicated to providing you with the information you need to have a profitable web site. If you succeed then I succeed PERIOD!

Hits - Visits - Unique Visits:
Explain them and which one do I trust?

What is a Hit: it is a single request to your Web server for an item that is on your Website. This item can be anything that is served from your website such as an PHP, HTML, file. It even considers your images, movies, sounds and more.

What is a Visit: it is a visit to your Web site from a single unique viewer. This can be humans, spiders, or other website tools such as scanners. When they visit it is counted, but we cannot forget it will also count the hits for each item it requests. If the visitor went to this page I would show 1 visit, but it would show the hits for every graphic, sound, and more that had to load on this page. If I have 30 graphics on this page it would show one visit, and 30 hits just for this page alone. So it turns out that this one visit had 31 hits.

TOP SECRET: One page can bring you a double hit just for the page alone. How is this possible? Look at my main URL www.michelespaintshop.com/ if you were to visit that url it would load my home index page and it would count in the hit pool. Now look at this URL www.michelespaintshop.com/videotutorials/dropshadowcutoutpsp.php. Take note of the forward slashes in the URL's listed. Each forward slash is considered a hit because it is loading another page within my site. This could mean that you had only 10 unique visits to that page, but it could list as 30 hits.

What are unique visits: a unique visit is just that. It only counts that actual visitor and nothing else. This is the true source you should consider when putting value on a website.

The entire point of this is to explain to you that you should not consider Visits and Hits being a valuable source of information. It is simply average, and only average if you consider the values above.

The bottom line: we cannot depend 100% on Hits, Visits, and even Uniques. We can only estimate from that information. When it comes to a websites true value you need to do your homework, and see how other sites, search engines, and analytics value a website. With that information you can make better choices. Good luck!

Graphics on site: This web sites graphics were all made by me using the Corel Paint Shop Professional program. We are currently working with software by Corel, and you can buy Corel Software directly from official site Corel.com . All animations are typically made with Corels Animation Shop 3. Animation Shop 3 Download (11.2 MB)