I was just scouring the web to see if anyone has posted some reviews for Sixty6 Hosting (for a thread I started to give out free hosting) and I came across some odd results: http://www.google.com/search?q=sixty6+hosting+review&hl=en&pwst=1&start=30&sa=N A few websites automatically redirect to HostGator, which are currently filled with keywords about hosting: www.publicbring.info/cpanel-hosting www.youngjakes.info/cpanel-hosting www.talldozer.info/cpanel-web-hosting Do you notice that you get the 403 message when you visit any of the above websites? Well why don't you try visiting them through Google: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=r...SG2ZUqIgjFaMvg4KA&sig2=11ARZK4ELzwRhDN0-sUi2A http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=r...kOCd771YXQRGlPQmQ&sig2=X7Y6TKf-YmMf6YJXeyTTZA http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=r...9bH6WrsmcfG13khEw&sig2=-NM41FVlTGPnaWfFm2Q1rg In fact, here are the descriptions that Google has them registered under: Obviously since I searched for "Sixty6 Hosting Reviews" they're only showing that snippet. I did some WHOIS on the above websites and all of them are pointing to ns1.shahnetwork.com and aren't allowed to transfer their domain names (and all have the same WHOIS): I did a WHOIS on Shahnetwork.com and it turns out to be an ordinary WHOIS under Michael Shah who lives in Florida! Why would anyone simply redirect to HostGator? Why not redirect through an affiliate link and look less inconspicuous? I just found that interesting, I don't know if they are doing it intentionally or not (I could care less, everything is fair when it comes to SEO).
I've seen sites before do this. Not sure if its a cloaking thing or what it is. My wild guess would be a cloacking, where if my ip's matched G's, they would show me a well optimized page, and if my ip wasn't G's (or Y,MSN,etc), I get redirected to BlueHost, HostGator or whoever. Maybe just redirects to a hosting reveiw site to get affiliate commissions by getting sign-ups. I'll be quite honest, I've seen this in the past and tried to figure out how its done, but cant. Anybody got any input on this?
It's based on the referral URL, but I'm more interested to simply see if they just chose HostGator randomly or if HostGator did something themselves (just curious)