Hyves Subdomain Trick – How to Find a Google Penalty


By on January 20, 2009 in google, seo with 10 Comments

Google are doing something very strange at the moment which allows you to check if a domain has been hit by a Google Penalty!

The trick was spotted on Mediadonis earlier today. All you need to do is type in hyves as the subdomain for the domain you want to check, e.g. http://hyves.seoptimise.com, and then view the Google Toolbar PageRank which appears when the page loads (in most cases a 404 error):

“You will now get one of three different results for the pagerank of this non-existent subdomain -> PR7, PR4 and PR0.

PR7 means that the domain is perfectly fine
PR4 means that the domain got penalized by google
PR0 means that the domain got banned in Google”

While I wouldn’t expect this to be entirely accurate (for example, does it work for all types of penalty?), but based on the results so far it does appear to be a reasonably clear indicator of which websites have been penalised for selling links.

I also wouldn’t expect this to work for much longer, but it’s a very interesting and easy way to check if you’ve had a penalty applied to your domain. hyves.seoptimise.com displays a PR 7 so I guess that’s good news, I’ve spotted a few PR4′s appearing for web directories too. Can you find a PR0 before Google fix this? ;)

Update: Google have now fixed this and a PR0 now appears for all non-existent hyves subdomains.

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Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

10 Comments

Got something to say? Feel free, I want to hear from you! Leave a Comment

  1. nooor says:
    January 20, 2009 at 9:36 pm ·

    great post
    i have a problem with the page rank
    my site was page rank 2 and suddenly became page rank N/A
    what is the reason?

  2. Jackie says:
    January 21, 2009 at 5:21 am ·

    Just checked your domain with hyves.seoptimise.com shows PR0 :(

  3. Vincent Tobiaz says:
    January 21, 2009 at 6:19 am ·

    definately not working …anymore…if it did at all

  4. Zoli says:
    January 21, 2009 at 9:03 am ·

    hello,
    is there any other usefull tool, which shows me, weather one of my domains got penalized by google or not?
    thanks

  5. Gabi says:
    January 21, 2009 at 11:09 am ·

    Hello,
    Trick doesn’t work anymore but check out cached snapshot for any of these inexistent subdomains… wtf?

  6. Jeet says:
    January 21, 2009 at 4:30 pm ·

    I was SUPER excited to see the tip, tried it and it didn’t work. Saw the ‘update’ later :(

  7. Surreypcsupport.com says:
    January 21, 2009 at 4:34 pm ·

    I tried this on my site and got PR0. I guess that is fine now though. I’m sure I would know if I was banned from Google.

  8. Cray says:
    February 8, 2009 at 1:31 pm ·

    Darn, a couple weeks too late :( Subscribed to your RSS so I won’t miss something like this the next time it comes around!

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