In the past when Pagerank looked like it's the main reason for good SERP's, some websites or let's say some webmasters managed to get their Pagerank to 8, 9 or 10 in short time. This pagerank was fake anyway.

I never managed to work out how they did it? Anyone here can help to enlighten me?

I am not exactly sure, but I came across this article once http://www.dejan.com.au/seo_news_library.html

It looks like is Blackhat technique.

Page ranks are not important on SERPs According to me there are 3 reasons for PR

i) Good direct traffic
ii) Good number of referring sites
iii) Weight of the backlinks.

They were using a technique of redirecting which was exploiting a loophole.

A web page which redirects to PR 10 site will get a PR 10 because web surfers that go to the redirection page will actually land on high PR site.

I think this black hat technique was called cloaking

Black hat cheats!!! I wonder how GOogle managed to find way around it? Or is still possible?

Does anyone know any Pagerank 10 websites? I think only Google gave themselves this PR, which is bit unfair.

Some other websites with Pagerank 10 are:

World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/
US Goverment website http://www.usa.gov/
Adobe - Adobe Reader Download http://get.adobe.com/reader/

Pagerank is a widely misunderstood thing, particularly in light of the fact that people either a) still put too much importance to it, or b) believe it's not completely irrelevant which it's not.

Short answer to the original question is they fake it. Faking this does NOT get them a better listing in Google or help them list or rank better in any way at all. It only serves to help them get more money out of people who are naively buying advertising based on page rank alone.

Why barely anyone except Google has a PR10. NEWSFLASH - it's NOT because they fake it or allocate it for themselves!
Basically Google uses a very complex algorithm to determine search engine results.
It uses a simpler subset of this algorithm to determine page rank.
It has never been something Google looks at to determine where to rank a site - it's an output the same way a search engine result it, not an input to a ranking algorithm.
In other words - a more basic version of what Google uses to rank/list a page is used to give a pagerank, which also does not take into account relevancy for any given search term. So if you have the best page rank in the world but you site is only half relevant to a keyword/keyphrase you won't do that well regardless. Also the algorithm used to determine pagerank was originally exactly the same as the listing/ranking algorithm, these days they are very different as it basically has not evolved in the same why as the main algorithm and is not as complex, hence why it is no longer completely relevant.

Secondly to the person who said "it's not fair of Google to give themselves 10 only", well it's based on a mathematical formula not a human choice. At once stage they were not PR10 themselves - which some people found weird. Google's algorithm only gave Google itself a 9. This changed a 10 for Google only a year or two ago, when the formula decided to give it one - not a person decided. For example, google.com.au is an PR8 not 10, and facebook is PR9, only Google.com is PR10.

The reason it's so hard to get higher PR's is because many people mistakenly believe it to be linear, when it's actually exponential - which is the reason why it's VERY hard to get a higher page rank than 3 or 4. What this mean is basically as follows, although my maths is simplified from the real one I think.
Page rank N/A - not enough relevance to get a pagerank
Page rank 0 - some amount of relevance (not sure exactly)
Page rank 1 - some other amount (again not sure)
Page rank 2 - 2 times as much "link juice" as PR1
Page rank 3 - 3 times as much "link juice" as PR2
Page rank 4 - 4 times as much "link juice" as PR3
.....
Pr 10 - 10 times as much "link juice as PR9"

So what this means Maths wise is to get from 9 to 10 it's just going up one small step - you have to have 10 times as many links as for a PR9, which in itself would be a massive amount!
Following my simplified Maths further, as you multiiply it out you discover that a PR 10 would require 3,628,800 times as many incoming links as a PR 1 - where as a PR 9 would require "only" 362,880 times as many links a PR1. Table is below (based on multiples of PR1):
1 -
2 2
3 6
4 24
5 120
6 720
7 5040
8 40320
9 362880
10 3628800

The above shows why there are lots of people with PR1, 2, 3 or 4, and why it is so hard to get higher than about 5 or 6!

While this ignores the link values, keeping it simple say to get to a PR1 may take 100 incoming links (noone knows the exact amount and it depends on link quality, but lets go with this).
Under this very rough guestimate, the following is the number of theoretical incoming links to get to each PR level based on my rough guess of 100 for a PR1 which I think is not far from accurate given my past observations.

PR Multiple Links
1 1 100
2 2 200
3 6 600
4 24 2400
5 120 12,000
6 720 72,000
7 5040 504,000
8 40320 4,032,000
9 362880 36,288,000
10 3628800 362,880,000

Given based on the above it would take 362 million incoming links to get a PR10, vs 36 million for a PR9, vs 72 thousand for a PR6, 600 for a PR3 etc, its no wonder there are very few sites with a genuine PageRank of 7 or higher.

Hope this explains it well and is of interest to someone as it took a while to type, but I think I got something out of it myself anyway from doing the Maths!

Matt
Marketing Web
________________________________________
Some sites I'm working on currently:
Lawn Mowing Albury
Laser Treatment Albury
Promotional Products
Resourcing Change
Christian Dating
Steel Cattle Yards

Hi marktingweb

Matt, that is one sweet Pagerank explanation, and great reply. Great to have experts like yourself part of the foums.

Cheers,