Archives for November 2007

SEO Mistakes: read the fine print

I still hear from people who get confused by solicitations in the mail. Here’s an example one:

This is not a bill

At first glance, this semi-official looking letter seems to require bill payment for some sort of “annual website search engine listing.” But if you read the fine print at the bottom, you’ll see:

This is not a bill. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer.

In other words, feel free to throw this letter in the trash. If you want to submit a url to Google, there are at least a couple ways to do it, for free:

– Google offers a free “add url” form where you can submit your domain name.
– You can make a Sitemap (a list of urls for your site) and submit it for free as well. Start here. There’s a lot of other free, useful tools from Google there too. 🙂

When you get a letter like this in the mail, whether it’s about your web site or your domain name, read the fine print carefully.

Detecting more “undetectable” webspam

I’ve been following a case in Denmark where a cloaking company has been making a couple interesting claims. First, they claim that if a “brand-name” company cloaks, Google won’t remove the brand-name domain. That’s simply not true; if we believe that a company is abusing Google’s index by cloaking, we certainly do reserve the right to remove that company’s domains from our index. Next, the cloaking company claims that their method of cloaking is undetectable. I’ve written about “undetectable webspam” before. In that case, the “undetectable spam” could be found with a single Google query.

So let’s go back to this Danish company’s assertion that its cloaking is “undetectable.” Here’s an example claim on the English version of their page:

Undetectable cloaking? English claims

The claim is that “search engines cannot find out who is behind cloaking.” The Danish version of this page is slightly different:

Undetectable cloaking? Danish claims

One colleague at Google translated the final sentence from Danish as “However, as you can read below, they don’t stand a chance at figuring out who’s behind the solution, and thus cannot punish anyone for it.”

My colleague Brian White checked this claim out and very quickly found this hilarious page:

Undetectable cloaking? An error page

Here’s another error page:

Undetectable cloaking? Another error page

That’s right, someone hasn’t configured their “undetectable” cloaking script correctly. The errors that the script is spewing out give absolute file paths and much more info. Digging into the details mentioned in the error messages quickly leads you to more domains. So much for that cloaking being undetectable. By the way, this cloaking script has been producing highly noticeable errors like this for almost two months.

So here’s a few takeaways:
– If you’re going to claim that your webspam is “undetectable” then try to avoid spewing error messages that give lots of information about your domains.
– Also, you might want to avoid internal names like “CLOAKING_LINK_BUILDING” or “CLOAKING_RSS_Reader.php”. It tends to be a bit of a giveaway, and you never know when those names will get accidentally exposed.

More generally, if someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users. That’s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not “undetectable.” For cloaking to be completely “undetectable,” it would have to be like that Steven Wright joke: “Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates.” And a cloaking script that gave users and Googlebot exactly duplicate pages would be a bit pointless. 🙂

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