my log files show their activity from the "site:www.areawebsolutions.com" google search they performed to the pages the looked at on my site. OOP was the verdict.
What were the IP's & Useragents of the hits? Also was the referrer string something like: google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.domain.com
the most recent was 72.14.195.56 the exact string is busied somewhere in my stats, but it is always a site search. sometimes with the http:// and sometimes without.
White hat SEO? There's not even such a thing as SEO anymore! The only SE that means a thing is google. And google simply works on how much relevant TRAFFIC / INBOUND there is to your site... So just keep creating FAST DIGESTIBLE QUALITY CONTENT and they will come... well.. as long as you do your PR (Public Relations) work as well...
That's automated, it's a bot that checks for referrer cloaking off the SERP's. Sometimes they run with non-Googlebot useragents to detect for Useragent cloaking also. The reason it's a site: search is because it's a query you rank for. MSN just uses any old terms you don't even rank for like "loans" and it not only buggers your stats but isn't real stealthy lol.
Yeah. I have read lots of contradicting info on what it really is. So how are you sure it's a bot and what is it that a bot collects by doing this?
It's done to check cloaking/redirects off the SERP's. For example to avoid detection some sites do something like: <?php $seref=array("google","msn","live","ask","yahoo"); $ser=0; foreach($seref as $ref) if(strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']),$ref)!==false){ $ser="1"; break; } if($ser=="1" && sizeof($_COOKIE)==0){ header("moneypage.com"); exit; }?> PHP: This way it will "only" redirect traffic coming from the major SE's to the money page, otherwise it will display a page of legitimate content. Think sites with 100k pages of scraped rewritten content, all driving search referrals to a single money page. This is pretty hard to detect with normal crawling mechanisms, because the redirect only occurs under a certain condition which is the HTTP referrer being from G/Y/MSN etc. So.. By hitting your site with a google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.yoursite.com referrer it can detect the redirect by comparing the contents of the destination page with what is being displayed during a normal crawl. Make sense?
Yeah. Does it match the current page with the cached one? And if so, how does it treat a redesigned website. Will it think it's a redirect?
I'd say your page was hit via regular Googlebot just before the referrer check to ensure almost simultaneous samples.
Black hat SEO may be rewarding in the short run, but good luck hanging on to your rankings in the long run. Google is constantly updating its algorithms to combat black hat techniques, so why waste your time? If you take the time to analyze your niche, find keyphrases that are searched for more than others and have low competition, write long, original, quality content, build up a meaningful internal linking structure, and update your content regularly and build a community around your website by allowing user contributions, then you will rank highly and be rewarded in the long run. We can discuss this all day, but at the end of the day the hard work pays off.
Anyone been able to hold onto black hat results for a couple years? Anyone spam here and get great results over the years?