Archive for the 'Black Hat SEO' Category

First, what is a 302 redirect? A 302 redirect is a temporary location for your webpage. As opposed to the Search Engine friendly 301 redirect which is a permanent relocation of your webpage.

The infamous 302 Hijack allows any website owner to have his “virtual page” appear in the SERP’s for terms that belong to another website. The “virtual pageâ€? is really a server-side redirect. The hijacked website will disappear, and the site that appears is the site with the 302 redirect. Instead of a server-side redirect script, you can use a meta-refresh with a url redirect and achieve the same results.

The virtual pages will appear in the SERP’s with the same title & description as the hijacked page, but a different URL as the hijacked website.

Then, Google makes a determination based on their duplicate content filter. And, the stronger page wins. It’s a survival of the fittest game.

I want to emphasize that this happens by accident most of the time…not by a malicious webmaster.
Yahoo and MSN have resolved this problem. However, Google has not, but is actively working on it.

A simple definition of Cloaking is: Delivering one version of a webpage to one visitor, and a different webpage version to another visitor.

If you’ve ever wondered about how to use cloaking for SEO, keep reading:

A cloaked webpage is really a CGI script which reads the IP address of any one requesting the webpage. Then, it compares the IP address of the entity requesting the webpage, to a list of IP addresses that belong to search engine spiders. If a match is found, then the requesting entity is identified as a search engine spider. If no match is found, then the entity requesting the webpage is identified as a human.

Then, the CGI script can selectively serve different content based on the identity of the requesting entity. If the requesting entity is human, it can serve the home page of the domain, or some other web page that is not highly optimized. If the requesting entity is a search engine spider, the CGI script can serve a highly optimized web page.

The objective of cloaking is that highly optimized web pages are served to search engine spiders, and humans get a different (more usable) web page… all from the same URL.

Cloaking is risky business. The search engines have publically stated that they frown on cloaking, and any websites they catch doing it can be penalized or banned from their index.

To minimize your risks, there are 3 strategies you can implement:

1. Use a different domain for your cloaked webpage than your primary website.
2. Maintain a current list of all the IP addresses for the search engine robots.
3. Try to keep your cloaked webpages out of the search engine cache.

Many search engines offer a cached copy of a webpage they have indexed. The cached copy defeats the purpose of cloaking by showing anyone the highly optimized version of your cloaked page. To prevent this from happening, make sure you use the ROBOTS NOARCHIVE meta tag on your optimized version of the cloaked pages and exlude any search engines that do not follow this convention.

Now, there is another caution to be aware of. Google has stated that any website using a ROBOTS NO ARCHIVE meta tag is suspect to be cloaking. So, if they ever throw out a net to catch everyone using this tag, you could be caught.

The question remains…should you do it? There is an ethical consideration, and a practical one.

Some people might think cloaking is sneaky and unethical. Those people claim that you are lying to the search engines about your website content in an effort to get better rankings you don’t deserve. And the people who argue that it is good claim that cloaked web pages are only providing relevant results to the search engines.

Finally, there is the issue of whether cloaking is practical for your business, or not. How much time is it going to take you to set up and maintain a cloaking system? Will it payoff? Will it make an ROI that make it worth all the costs of the software, programming, and new domain / hosting?

For a list of Spiders and Robots: IAB website

Just a quick thought on how to use an iframe for SEO.
iframe is a page within a page and you can assign it a height and width (1×1). No one will notice it. Then, program it from a database to automatically populate with text links from any desired list. When a spider hits the iframe, it will consider it as a completely separate domain, and spider/index it separately.

When the search engine shows that iframe url in the SERP’s, and someone clicks on the iframe url, you can program the source code to redirect the iframe to your main website.
Any other ip address trying to click on that link, will be redirected to your site. Your site will be the only one to call the iframe.

We can even use cloaking software to the iframe. So, if it get’s removed from the index. It will have no effect on your main domain. Then, repeat this process if necessary as many times as needed with a new domain as the iframe. Pretty slick.
Blackhat or not?