Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Odd PageRank for "Hyves" Subdomain

As Mediadonis noticed, you get strange PageRank results when you use “hyves” as subdomain. For instance, hyves.google.com, hyves.blogoscoped.com, hyves.example.com all show a PageRank 7 when I tried (when they should show a PR0 as they’re nonexistent). A site like hyves.cbschmidt.de on the other hand shows a PR4. Furthermore, if you do a backlinks search in Google for link:hyves.something.com, link:hyves.foobar.com and so on, you’ll always get the same 26,000+ backlinks.

I’m not sure what’s happening here, but David Mulder in the comments says: “If you wonder what hyves is; Hyves is the most commonly used social network in the netherlands which I would compare most with myspace concerning its interface and ease of use...” (Note Hyves.nl has a PageRank of 7.) And as Roger Browne notes, the backlinks shown when searching for e.g. link:hyves.foobar.com are the same as those shown for link:hyves.com (albeit I don’t see a site at hyves.com). For some theories as to what’s happening, take a look at the Mediadonis post and the previous comments to this thread.

[Thanks WebSonic.nl and Steve Johnston!]

Update: And it doesn’t work anymore. Looks like Google might have adjusted something. [Thanks John Wesley!]

Odd PageRank for "Hyves" ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (17+7)

>> More posts

Advertisement