Comments on: Shady Sites Cloaking My Blog’s Name & Domain – Wonder Why?

By: Ben Wilks

Ben Wilks — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 03:43:31 +0000

They are cloaking and scraping your content to rank, no biggie if they link to you as well!

By: Terry

Terry — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 02:57:09 +0000

I admit I know zippo about scraping Steven, but why would they scrape this site for gambling and pills? And then why hide the text? It just didn’t/doesn’t make sense to me.

My sites have been scraped for eons for on topic things, and they’re not hiding chunks of info or cloaking it. This kind of thing was really new to me.

But I think you’re right. In this case it’s simply scrapers gone wild. I did learn a lot from this though.

Thanks for your note Steven.

By: Steven

Steven — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:48:42 +0000

Your site name appears because it was scraped, most likely. People will sometimes produce thousands of pages with a program that “scrapes” the web for content. That is why some of the sentences in the search results make no sense. They are just copied from the web and pasted onto a page. Your name got scraped and it really has nothing to do with you or your site.

Under the theory that outbound links make your site look more authoritative, the scrapers will also build pages with outbound links on them as well. Sometimes I’ll see a bump in traffic and I’ll find that my site was scraped and added as an outbound link on a website.

By: Terry

Terry — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:52:26 +0000

I don’t understand it all myself Empress. I know that a few links in the SERPs I click redirect to some gambling page. Maybe if I was a googlebot I’d get a different page, by the looks of the serps descriptions – I’d say yes.

I wasn’t able to spend a whole bunch of time on this last night, but I think the real story is in the backlinks to those sites and who is feeding them links and how.

By: Empress

Empress — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:32:22 +0000

I wonder if they’re trying to boost their sites with good PageRank sites – or sites that legitimate to promote their not so legit sites…. with cloaking and redirects?

By: Terry

Terry — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:21:57 +0000

Wow you’re fast SpamHuntress!

Thanks for checking that out for me.

I’m going to gather a bunch of info and submit it to all three engines for them to check out because I’m not interested in my blog being caught up in this crap. I’ll be watching more closely for this now that I have an idea what’s going on.

I’ve been doing a bit of whois and backlinks digging – this stuff is *crazy*.

By: Spamhuntress

Spamhuntress — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:54:44 +0000

Very weird.

Check this site:
http://buy-cialis.buy-baby-gift-a.be/purchase-cialis-online.html

Then search the site for superaff.

You’ll find several instances that are nearly invisible. IE you won’t see them until you search for them. White text on extremely light blue background. And the domain is in the search field as well.

I checked test.com in the search field, and that produces a page with the same treatment for test.com.

But the page I landed at was not a search URL, but a page.

Then I did a control test. I searched for a phrase that was on the page at the time of Google’s cache, and searched Google for it. I then clicked on the link to the page, and this time the search terms were highlighted the same way superaff was.

There’s a script on the page that does this, and it uses the referrer to determine what to display.

The term Affiliate Marketing Gab was included on the page at one time, with the link to superaff.

Looks like they’re cloaking. If you even see the source of the page, you’ll see a lot of text. And this time it’s about Cialis. But that’s not visible if you visit with a browser.

But at some point, there was a link or some text referencing your site at that page. When you first get into scraper directories, you usually get into several. My guess is you’ll find a similar layout on the pages you do find this way…