Competitors Cheating On Google
I’m feeling a tad narked….I just contacted a competitor with excellent page rankings asking them if they wanted to swap links as my PRs aren’t too bad either and suddenly realised they had a whole load of cloaked text on each page of their site full of keywords.
According to Wikipedia:
Cloaking is a black hat (means naughty tactics) search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.
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. SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking
Firstly I thought perhaps I should tell them this can get them banned from Google, perhaps they don’t realise? Then I thought, errr what if they do know, and are very unimpressed by my holier than thou pointing it out to them. Hmmm.
So I visited Google to check out their policy on cloaking text and thought about pointing them to that page before deciding they would definitely be less than impressed and to leave them to it.
At the same time I checked if there was anywhere to ‘report’ them (I know, I know, but it’s not fair). There isn’t anywhere to report them that I can find.
So they are going to sit there with their cloaked text getting a great ranking whilst Google tells us not to do it or we will face being banned….how can we compete if some people are cheating and we are not! …..Sulks…..
December 7th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Hey there - I know it’s an old post on your blog, but just saw this and can truly empathise with how you feel.
We have the same problem - we do everything absolutely by the book and it’s annoying when you see others cheating their way to the top. But I think that’s business and life in general - people cheat, they benefit, and the good and the just lose out… in the short term. Longer term - well, your rivals will disappear from Google, and you’ll consequently climb.
Having said that, I’m no longer convinced that Google is the be all and end all of attracting traffic. Forum and blog links are still incredibly powerful.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Well recently I was punished by Google for three way link swapping (some sites asked and I thought, what the hey) and they took away my page rank. I didn’t even realise they had such an issue with three way link swaps. They took my pr but not my position in the search engine.
I asked very nicely for it back and they obliged in less than a week which I was impressed by.
What I learned from this is to stop obsessing about Google and just get on with building such a good site that you will automatically rank well for. This site does rank well, but as you know….the thirst for a better and better stakehold on the Internet never ends does it
I read somewhere that if you spend all your time that you normally spend trying to trick Google in actually writing great content you’ll automatically get those inbound links and good ranking for keywords due to content.
So since this episode I’ve been just writing good content and am stopping any link swapping at all.
I have to agree that Google isn’t the be all and end all of website traffic because most of my traffic comes from elsewhere and this blog has been a major traffic driver this year, which is in it’s first year.
Amanda