SEO Hong Kong | HK Search Marketing and Optimization Blog

Mediadonis reports that there is a new way, albeit strange, weird (or whatever you may call it), to check if a site is penalized or banned by Google.

To find out just use the word “hyves” as a subdomain of your website so that if you manage example.com, enter hyves.example.com. Yes, you’d say that it doesn’t exist and therefore should have no PageRank. But Google displays that non existent page’s PageRank value.

Based on a few tests, it was theorized that PageRank values, as shown in Google Toolbar, mean something:

* PageRank 7 – Site is doing fine in front of the eyes of Google
* PageRank 4 – Site got penalized by Google
* PageRank 0 – Site got banned by Google

I tried it in both this blog and my personal non-updated site and am glad that they’re both OK.

It’s really bizarre to see this kind of result that one could have many questions in mind:

* Who/what is hyves by the way? Hyves is a Dutch social networking site and that’s all I know.
* Why does Google display PageRank value
* Is this a bug?
* Is this an Easter Egg feature?

Maybe Google’s Matt Cutts could shed light about this one. I think this “feature” won’t work shortly, so in the mean time let’s do a quick check on our sites.