Scott Fish

I was doing some “domain” keyword research today and I found a site doing some good ol’ cloaking.

- I guess it still works very well!

http://www.google.com/search?q=domain+football+myspace.com

It’s the 2nd result (”domainsponcer.com” [which happens to be a typo of parking company DomainSponsor.com]) - you’ll see that when you click on it, it takes you to an adultfriendfinder.com affiliate site, but if you click the cached version in google, you’ll see the cloaked page.

So here’s whats happening for this page to be cloaked….The website serves 1 page to search engine crawlers that is loaded with keyword spam and links to other inner pages. Then when the site is indexed, 1 different page is served to the visitor, and that happens to be an affiliate link. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. There has been lots of discussion over how to use cloaking legitimately such as displaying paid content in full to a SE spider, while the user only sees a summary of the content.

I wouldn’t doubt that this site gets a nice amount of traffic and makes quite a bit of money, but sooner or later google or yahoo may figure this one out and ban the domain.