Category Archives: Spam and Penalties

Amazon Caught Cloaking

I love playing with the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox. I just discovered that Amazon was cloaking its affiliate links thanks to that tool.

Cloaking is when a site displays one page to a search engine bot, while a regular user will see something different. Cloaking is used to manipulate search bots’ behaviour, and therefore obtain better search engine rankings.

I was browsing Uncrate the other day and after clicking on a link to Kanye West’s Graduation page on Amazon, I realized something fishy. Uncrate used the following affiliate link on their post:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000RG1FMO/ref=nosim/uncrate-20

But after I clicked, the link redirected to:

http://www.amazon.com/Graduation-Kanye-West/dp/B000RG1FMO

Wow, something is wrong here… I checked the status of the User Agent Switcher plugin and noticed that it was set to GoogleBot…

So then I decided to check the HTTP Headers of this redirection with Live HTTP Headers,another excellent Firefox plugin. And here’s what I found:

It’s a HTTP 301 Redirect!!! Click on the image (or here) to see the text version of these HTTP Headers. I’ve checked with other Amazon affiliate links, and it always redirected to the product page with a 301. Amazon is cloaking its affiliate links to get more links to their product pages and therefore rank higher in search engine results.

Clearly, this is unfair for other websites’ owners competiting with Amazon.

If Amazon wasn’t using 301 redirects on their affiliate links, they wouldn’t have that many links pointing to their product pages, and then it will be more difficult for them to get high rankings.

Google Notebook Spam

Apparently, some spammers are trying to see if their Google Notebook public pages are helping them improve their SERPS pollution. Check out this ugly page (link condom applied)that has been named “test”…
I wonder if Google Notebook is going to be used for spam as much as BlogSpot is.

When your SEO company isn’t even able to spam properly

Today, I’m going to replace Matt Cutts. I was doing some research yesterday to get some information about setting up a company in Luxembourg.

With Google, with the keywords “creation entreprise luxembourg” in French (“set up company luxembourg” in English), the first listing that I find is the Luxembourg Minister of Economy and Trade…. Great, I should be able to find the best information with this site.

Well, not if the SEO company that worked for them didn’t mess up with the site. Because the CSS spam they used is currently explicitly viewable, it’s impossible to read the site.

If you look on the right bottom of all this list of links, which is inside a CSS div, you can see lots of anchor text spamming focused on the site’s keywords, but also a link with the anchor text “Référencement”, or “SEO” in English that goes to the excellent SEO company who did the job for them and added a link to themselves in the mean time. I looked into the code to find their URL, because I couldn’t click on the link… The company is referencement.com, a french SEO company that calls itself ‘A leading SEO company’ on their site…

Now, can someone tell me how you can do something like that to a client, disrespect his visitors and take so many risks?