http://www.mediadonis.net/?p=378

[Typo in title corrected – Tony]

Weird, but it does work! As the article says, I see pagerank 7 for hyves.uclue.com but pagerank 0 for any other made-up subdomain.

And now check this: link:hyves.blogoscoped.com has thousands of incoming links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fhyves.blogoscoped.com&meta=

Maybe related to the news of last week about:
"google indexes hyves (social network) information".
http://webwereld.nl/articles/54394/hyves-laat-google-los-op-gebruikersgegevens.html

They got some special treatment, and this a bug/ result of that?

> And now check this: link:hyves.blogoscoped.com has
> thousands of incoming links:

Odd, and you can replace "blogoscoped" in that search with other domains and you get the exact same backlinks...

// Google PageRank calculator?

if(domain matches 'hyves')
   PageRank = 7;
else
   PageRank = algorithmicPageRank();
if(domain is penalized)
   PageRank = PageRank – 3;
elseif(domain is banned)
   PageRank = PageRank – 7;

First of all they didn't get special treatment, they simply allowed the googlebot into its site. Secondly http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fhyves.abcaidjfoiaejrlakdjf.com&btnG=Search is also giving exactly the same backlinks.

PS. 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...

Oops, didn't refresh the page the last 5 minutes

> ...you can replace "blogoscoped" in that search with other
> domains and you get the exact same backlinks...

Those are the backlinks of hyves.com.

I reckon Google has hand-tweaked the pagerank of hyves.nl and hyves.net to 7. Instead of testing for them separately, they just tested for a domain name starting with "hyves.", conveniently forgetting about subdomains.

I posted the "Page Rank Calculator" code (above) in jest, but I think it might be spot on.

Which means Philipp will need to update his algorithm here:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-31-n30.html

Wouldn't this proof that when you linksell and get caught only your visible pagerank is downgraded (-3) while the real "7" is the one still in use by the ranking algos?

It doesn't always work, check the comments on the original page (e.g. hyves.cbschmidt.de)

roger you are on to it. The domain hyves.com is not owned by the hyves social network, and it doesn't resolve (404). But it gets the same inlinks as hyves.XXXXX.com and a pagerank of 7. Idem for hyves.net that is hardly linked, but also same inlinks and pagerank.

David: I see PR3 for chschmidt.de, and PR4 for hyves.cbschmidt.de which fits the theory, unlike the commenter on the original page who got PR3 for both.

And my last post on this, when I PR check the site: "hennes-maurits.hyves.blogoscoped.com" I get a PR5 :) congrats philipp

Thing is that Hyves.nl is a big Dutch website like Myspace, recently it was announced by Hyves.nl that there where letting Google index the profile pages, starting end of this month. Sweet function within Hyves is that a member can set there own description and title tag :-).

My conclusion: before hyves let google index all its pages, hyves told google that:
profilename.hyves.nl
is exactly the same as
profilename.hyves.net, profilename.hyves.fr, profilename.hyves.es, profilename.hyves.it.

To avoid any problems of a profile appearing with different domain extensions, google said they would threat all hyves.EXTENSION the same.

I once created hyves.seweso.com and pointed that to hyves.nl, and then I was able to load profile.hyves.seweso.com

That was a bit strange.

I guess someone screwed up. They probably treated hyves differently. At least the going-live-part.

What i guess happened, is google and hyves negotiating some sort of deal....

Hyves is very very big in the Netherlands.

Wait a sec.

When i created hyves.seweso.com....a year ago (or more). I also notices that the content was being indexed by google at the time. So i was able to find hyves profiles on google and stumble on my site. I even got referers from google to profile.hyves.seweso.com

And on top of that, Raymond Spanjar (the owner/creator of hyves) contacted me that i should remove the hyves.seweso.com subdomain. Aha i found something, it was on 2006-09-10. He send me a message through hyves. But i removed the account, so the message is gone.

Fun is over. The trick no longer works. That was a fun 6 hours.

No Pagerank, but still thinks that any hyves.whatever.com is hyves.nl:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//hyves.blogoscoped.com/

Now that I think about it, that was (haven't checked it in a while) the typical behaviour of a 302 redirect – when you deleted the redirect, the page that was redirected showed the PR, links and cache of the target page until reindexed.

The problem is, Hyves is using a lot of domains for serving their content. Like, hyves.net, hyves.com, hyves.eu, hyves.nl. Then, they use a lot of subdomains, like server33575.hyves.nl for serving the content for one or more profiles.

I assume that Google is giving all sites with "hyves" in the domain the same pagerank, so that their crawler isn't confused about all that different domains and subdomains Hyves is using.

But, they should check on the second level of a domain, not on "any" level. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name#Second-level_and_lower_level_domains)

Yv.: The number of linking sites is not thousands, 'about 26,100'