Excellent forensic article on reverse engineering SE cloaking. EXCELLENT.

This was put together, I think, by a lawyer who was going after spyware companies. The spyware companies used cloaking to get their message out and push their critics down in the SEs. The lawyer analyzed their cloaking campaign, and tried to put a stop to it.

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-spam/

Among other findings, google is weak on punishing abuse, even when a site is "manually" removed from the index.

"I am surprised by these brief exclusions -- 16 to 42 days of removal, as punishment for cloaking that lasted roughly 22 months. Google's Information for Webmasters FAQ threatens to "permanently ban" sites as punishment for cloaking. In contrast, such brief punishments set incentives that encourage cloaking: A possible 16 to 42 day expulsion from search engines might be thought a reasonable price to pay for the boost in rankings that cloaking offers."

Truly great article in my opinion.

Thomas.

 

Don't want to be a pest, just understand the rules better.

I originally posted this in the google forum because I figured decloaking google-cloaked sites was relevant in seo for google.

Is it just a gut thing, or is there a logic to it?

t.

 

I think if you spend a lot of money on adwords, google is more tolerant of cloaking and other types of "bad behavior."

But it has to be really a lot.

thomas.

 

OK I don't have anything rock solid, and if I did I might not want to be too open about it.

But I have been seeing a lot of big ticket adwords customers that are not good "google citizens", ie multiple redirects, blatant cloaking, sites that don't let you hit the back button into google, no index, hundreds of links on a page. Seemingly good candidates for "manual removal." But, they are not getting manually removed. And given the economics of it, it seems reasonable to suspect that this is a case of google knowing which side its bread is buttered on.

These sites will probably be knocked out when the algorithm catches up to this type of spam, but if they were candidates for manual removal as well, google may well be deciding not to pull the trigger.

thomas.

 

Just to comment on the original post, I've talked to Ben in the past about that exact article - he does a very thorough and complete job researching stuff ... and definately one of the "good guys" IMHO ...

 

I was definitely impressed. I can't really think of a good reason to cloak a web page/site but I know that a lot of people do.

 

I know a good reason - cloaking affiliate pages like zappos so you dont have to get the customer to click on your page to transfer over to zappos to make the sale.. Im sure youve all seen this done a thousand times... lol.

 

That's a good reason.

If you have a lot of critics, but can get enough "friendly" pages pumped into the first 10 or 20 SE rankings, you may be able to do a lot of damage control.

That stated, it is a lot harder to "buy your way to good PR" (PR as in public relations ) on the internet than in the "traditional" news medias like paper TV and radio.

Thank goodness.

thomas.

 

I think the guy does legal research for law firms in high profile internet court battles.

Feel like I should really spend a few hours going over the entire site... fascinating stuff.

 

Simply not true.

If you go to google and do a search for "cloaking software", you will see a great many bits of software, designed specifically for cloaking.

If you click on the ads, you will also see that the sites are banned.

There is absoutley no connection between the Google paid results and the natural SERP's.

If your previous statement were true, then anyone cloaking a site would almost certianly back it up with an adwords campaign - thus dominating the SERP's, and not being kicked out.

 

SEbasic, you wrote:

"If your previous statement were true, then anyone cloaking a site would almost certianly back it up with an adwords campaign - thus dominating the SERP's, and not being kicked out."

This is what I am seeing. Sites are getting into the serps on cloaking, and simultaneously doing big ticket adword campaigns for the terms they didn't make it into the top 10 serps with. And they are not being booted.

As I stated, I expect they will be booted eventually, when the "algorithm" figures it out. However, they will not be manually booted, the ultimate kiss of death.

thomas.

 

I did what you said, searched

cloaking software

and clicked on the first adword. The site had a PR5.

http://fantomaster.com/faprogs0.html

Maybe you could elaborate?

thomas.

 

searchenginecloaker.com
___________
It may well be true that the site is not booted out manually.
It is a known fact that G prefers to perform algo tweaks to filter out spammy results rather than remove them manually.

Having an adwords campaign will not "keep you safe" from being booted.

Think about it, if anything, G would prefer to boot out the cloaking sites because that means that they will have to spend more cash on their adwords campaign.

I'm not saying that my previous statement is true of every site (How could I).

The thing is, if you perform a search for "Cloaking Software", the sites that come up are bound to have PR. Otherwise they wouldn't be there at all.

If you clink on the adwords being displayed, you'll probabally find that most of the sites have no PR.

To say that "Having an adwords campaign will stop your cloaked site from being banned" is rediculous.

Otherwise anyone who has a cloaked site, could spend $1.00 a month, and be sure that they would be OK.

It's just doesn't work like that.

Adwords and the natural SERP's are COMPLETLY SEPERATE.

 

Howdy folks. Sorry to take so long to join the group here -- was getting a bit of (much-needed!) vacation.

tphyahoo, I think you're right to emphasize the duration of exclusion vis-a-vis the duration of prohibited behavior. This ratio (1:15, give or take) combined with the low probability of detection mean that any self-interested site can feel confident in breaking the rules. Even if they get caught (which is unlikely, in general, I gather), the penalty will be small compared to the benefit.

I think tphyahoo is also exactly right in post #10 as to the benefit of getting "friendly" pages into top spots in SE rankings. That was pretty clearly Google's goal here, and in their companion scheme of republishing news articles ( http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-copy ).

digitalpoint and mopacfan, as to cloaking more generally: I've never heard of Google penalizing sites that cloak for "good" reasons. Cloak to offer better HTML, or to offer geo-targeted content, and Google won't care. Cloak to offer Google's bots content that no one else gets, that's substantively unrelated to the main site, and you may be in trouble if Google ever notices & investigates.

Alex, thanks for the kind words.

As to my credentials and plans: I'm primarily a Ph.D. candidate in Economics amd a law student, and I'm only a consultant (working on spyware, among other issues) in my remaining spare time. http://www.benedelman.org/bio

Ben

 

sebasic says:

>> Having an adwords campaign will not "keep you safe" from being booted.

I say:

Having a LARGE adwords campaign might help you from being "manually" booted. The whole thing is cloaked in secrecy. You can't prove you're right and I can't prove I'm right. But I can argue there's a good chance I am right, point to evidence, and argue with your evidence...

sebasic >> Think about it, if anything, G would prefer to boot out the cloaking sites because that means that they will have to spend more cash on their adwords campaign.

tphyahoo >> Yeah, but if they piss off their adwords customers, say, by sending PR0ing the entire domain... the "right" thing to do... well, there might be a backlash... when it is so easy to just ignore the abuse... let the big fish sweat but basically do nothing... make an example out of some pissant SEO operator with no adwords campaigns to speak of... doesn't sound so implausible to me. Sounds like bidness.

sebasic >> The thing is, if you perform a search for "Cloaking Software", the sites that come up are bound to have PR. Otherwise they wouldn't be there at all. If you clink on the adwords being displayed, you'll probabally find that most of the sites have no PR.

tphyahoo >> Okay, here is where I lose you. I DID click, and the first one I clicked DID have PR. And I posted which one it was here on the forum. PR5. Maybe I am seeing different ads out here in Europe? If you would be more specific about what you are seeing, and how it leads you to your conclusions, maybe we could make some progress.

(Or I could convince you I am right... heh heh heh... )

sebasic >> To say that "Having an adwords campaign will stop your cloaked site from being banned" is rediculous.

tphyahoo >> Yeah but that's not what I am saying. I am saying it might reduce the probability of it being banned, especially if it is a LARGE campaign.

sebasic >> Otherwise anyone who has a cloaked site, could spend $1.00 a month, and be sure that they would be OK.

tphyahoo >> Did I mention it has to be a LARGE campaign?

sebasic >> It's just doesn't work like that.

Adwords and the natural SERP's are COMPLETLY SEPERATE.[/QUOTE]

tphyahoo >> that's what they want you to think... sleep little sheep... sleep and know that google is a kind and just master... bwa ha ha!



thomas.

 

Sebasic, I don't understand what point you are trying to get across.

Was this an adword for you, for "cloaking software"?

Elaborate if you please...

thomas.

 

It is not an adword that I am running.

You will notice that the site has a PR0 though.

I don't know, I cloak sites on a regular basis. None of the sites have yet been caught of banned.

So really, unless I start to run an adwords campaign for these sites, I am really never going to know for sure.

I guess I would like to think that SERP's and Sponsored listings are seperate (Which I do believe still).

I guess The only way we will find out it if I start running adwords on some of my cloaked sites.

 

Would they even bother investing the time involved to investigate this:

if(eregi("googlebot",$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) 

{ 

echo '<a href="Lucrative URL">Lucrative Link</a>';

} 

PHP:

Server side cloaking like this can only be detected if they visit again with a different user agent, you reckon this is dangerous practice though?