Cloaking:
You cloak a Webpage by using a CGI script to read the IP address of your visitor. This is then checked against a list of IP’s that identify Search Engine Spiders. If the IP is not listed then the CGI script serves up a standard Webpage designed to be read by a person. If it is listed then it serves up a highly optimized (and unreadable) page designed to enhance the site’s ranking in the Search Engine.
Cloaking is a risky business. If discovered it can lead to your site being banned from the Search Engine’s Index.
Methods often used to minimize the risk of banning include:
Using a different domain for the cloaked page.
Keeping the list of Spider IP’s up-to-date.
Keeping the cloaked page out of the Search Engine cache by using the ‘robots no archive’ meta tag and serving the ‘human’ page to any spider that ignores this tag.
Of course, the appearance of the ‘robots no archive’ meta tag immediately flags up the page as a potentially cloaked page and if the Search Engine ever trawls for this tag you’ll be caught.
302 Redirect Hijack
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But what is it? Well, a ‘302 redirect’ points to a temporary location, unlike the more normal ‘301 redirect’ which points to a permanent location. The ‘302 Redirect Hijack’ allows a Website owner to present a page in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) with the same title and description as the page it is intending to hijack. Only the URL is different. This ‘virtual page’ is actually a server-side redirect. If you click on the link, instead of going to the page you think you are going to you will be redirected to the page with the ‘302 redirect’. Hijacked, in other words.
A further problem then arises with Google’s Duplicate Content Filter. Basically it sees two identical descriptions and determines that the one that gets the most clicks is the correct one, and that’s usually the ‘302 redirect’.
If you think your site is the subject of a ‘302 Redirect Hijack’ there are a few things you can do. Firstly, use the ‘HTML’ tag. The ‘base’ element specifies a base URL for all the links in a page. Secondly, use absolute links within the site so that all links inclide the domain name. Thirdly, add the current time on each page so that each time a spider checks it the page will be subtly different.
Link Farms:
Search Engine Ranking is highly influenced by the number of links pointing to your page, hence a favourite ‘Black Hat’ technique known as ‘Link Farming’. There are two methods of link farming, Single Target Link Farms and Multi Target Link Farms, and a lot of time and effort has gone into determining which method works best and which is hardest for the search engines to identify.
Stanford University produced a research paper, “http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=2005-15&format=pdf&compression=&name=2005-15.pdf” , that concluded for a link farm to operate optimally all boosting pages should point to, and only to, the target; all hijacked links should point to the target and; some links from the target should point back to one or more of the boosting pages.
Spammers use irregular structures with multiple target pages and their booster pages will often include three or four links to authority pages like Wikipedia.
Link farms are a quick method of getting into the top positions in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). A similar effect can be achieved without Link Farms. If you buy links on about six Websites that have around 20,000 pages each and use a site-wide text link, containing your keyword in the anchor, you will pretty soon outrank anyone else on the SERP.
If you want a simple demonstration of how this actually works go to Google and do a search on the single word ‘failure’, who appears at the top of the list? Do you think he optimized his site for that result?
Of course, Search Engines began altering their algorithms to put a stop to as much of this as they could. Last year rumours began appearing of devious people putting site-wide links on multiple sites and pointing them at their competitors to eliminate them from the SERP. Google’s ranking algorithm would penalise the target site by removing it from the SERP’s. The name ‘Googlebowling’ was coined as the site’s were literally ‘bowled over’. Of course, this could just be an SEO urban myth but it just goes to show, Black Hat Techniques can sometimes turn and bite back.