Nigritude Ultramarine SERP position killed by copying & cloaking

Blackhats officially exist in the Nigritude Ultramarine world. My top ranking Nigritude Ultramarine SERP position was killed by copying and cloaking. Google saw my page, and the copy, and culled my page as being a duplicate page. While the webmaster concerned has some interesting comments on the Webproworld forum post regarding my Nigritude Ultramarine SERP position, I do not consider copying and cloaking is acceptable behaviour AT ALL.

It was not just me that was affected. See the upward movement of several sites on the digitalpoint ultramarine keyword tracker (as shown on the Time2Dine site). I have been in contact with several of the sites affected,and they are obviously not happy either.

For more information see my Nigritude Ultramarine against cloaking page.

Lets have this game free from the deliberate sabotaging of competitors entries.

 

I see this as a learning curve for goggle; one that they will be monitoring and spending many man hours doing so on. It MUST be costing them many dollars to monitor.

What is happening is that they will be looking for weakness in their algo, and those that use "unfair" "black hat" ways of doing things will be found out ? and can be removed IP wise etc.

They are shooting then self in the foot... or where ever... those that use unfair ways.

 

Hi.

I love a fair game, but the nigritude ultramarine game reflects the issues we have to work with every day. I recommend you deal with it the same way as you would if this had happend with any other page you own.
Complain to Google and send the website owner and their host a complaint. If you are lucky the host will take the web site off-line until the issue are resolved. Just metion in the complaint that they (the host) could become a part of a lawsuit.

 

I totally agree Sorvoja. The webmaster has been notified and has responded. Google has been notified. I have had emails from the contest organiser. I am publicising it. The extra publicity may just backfire on them and end up helping me. Just no mention of lawsuit. It is meant to be a "fun" competition.

Always good to be first off the block to find the issue and report on it.

So where is the analysis on the nigritude-ultramarine.com entry? Has it got itself sandboxed somehow?

 

I'm not supporting cloaking in any matter. But weren't the rules to get to the top any way you could? I was sitting at #4 for the longest time until people started getting real spammy. So I got real spammy. Now I'm sitting at #11, but by being spammy. Otherwise I'd be in the 30s.



Hexed

 

Hi hexed,

My ultramarine support page is #24 of 174.000. I only have a small number of backlinks, a new domain. I am proud to be in the top 30 without cheating. I do know how to program so I could easily grab other pages, hide the from users and feed Googlebot, but to do so is not right. Why do something I normally would not do? I want to make friends not enemies.

 

Hi t2dman,

Is it ok if I translate your Nigritude Ultramarine against cloaking page into Norwegian and publicate in on my web site, if it is ok I would need your name.

 

Hi,

It happend to us too.

Some websites have stolen pages from our website.
We will take the same actions as if it had been any other page on our website.
We will fight for our property.

Why steal a norwegian nigritude ultramarine page? Crazy english speaking people. :-(

The thives are now at rank 6 and 7. It is a stupid info domain.

 

While I sympathize with your plight at being sabotaged t2dman, I am glad that Blue Falcon has made his endeavor public. Knowing there is a problem is the first step to solving it. Onwards search engines... onwards, ho...

 

Hi,

It is not ok to steal copyrighted work, not even for a SEO-competition.

On the positive side, I checked myu ranking with the Digital Point Tool:

Number 21 is not bad for a white hat
I have been writing to Google and Yahoo all day, and hopefully some of the spam results and cloaked pages will be removed before June 7th.

In a day or so the nigritude-ultramarine.com page will climb the rankings, and hopefully we will be able to prove that a white hat page can outrank anything.


It is not illegal to use cloaking or other unethical SEO methods, but it is illegal to steal webpages. This "Blue Falcon" guy, has done so before outside this contest. http://wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel_talk:Non-compliant_redistribution

 

I didn't say it was. I agree with you completely.

 

I think there is an underlying danger in all this that no-one seems to be picking-up.

I watched what happened and felt sorry for t2dman like everyone else. I knew he would be posting here so I highlighted the issue elsewhere at the time. If BlueFalcons admission to using a combination of API and big G's own cache results in the API being withdrawn or heavily restricted we could all be crying over this business.

The nigritude ultramarine competition will certainly result in new restrictions and I have a horrible feeling the use of the API will be an early casualty and I don't think that is casual scaremongering on my part.

Mike

 

Hi Mike,

If Google makes it harder to use the API for evil deeds then it would be nice, but I beleive it would not affect criminals like this "Blue Falcon" he is a Perl programmer, and has probably just built a web crawler to fit his need. To do what he did, is fairly easy and there are plenty of tutorials on the web.

The bad guys has no need for the API, and I beleive Google knows that.

 

Would somebody be so kind as to explain the term "cloaking" to me - I don't really understand what it means in that context.

Rgds

 

Hi,

Cloacking is the act of presenting one set of content to search engine spider like Googlebot, and another set of content to web browsers like Internet Explorer. This is done by checking the User-Agent and the Ip-Address of visitors to your website. The programs doing this checking is referred to as cloaking scripts.

This "Blue Falcon" guy, has first stolen a few hundred webpages from other web sites, then he are using these pages for cloacking. Letting Googlebot index the stolen content while he redirects all browsers to his Nigritude-Ultramarine competition page.

He has probably used a perl script to crawl the Google results and fetch many of the competion pages for "nigritude ultramarine" contest.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO method, but it is not illegal. Stealing other websites content on the other hand is a criminal act.

 

Cloaking

 

Okay - just me worrying too much (but it would be a pain).

Mike