Cold Fusion

boy, does it work!

[lizzie]

I see cloaked pages using cold fusion that are in number
one position everywhere for every keyword. It gives the
appearance of being the same page but it is just everywhere,
ranked one in every keyword.
They obviously have a large number of pages, but beyond
this how this operates remains a mystery to me. I know where to
read about Cold Fusion and intend to study it. What I would
like to know is how are they getting the same appearing page
in all these places? Is the Cold Fusion just to protect the code or is this part of how they get the great rankings all over?
It is impossible to see exactly what they are doing, but it looks like the same page is everywhere, ranked number one.And how do they submit all these similar pages? Hope someone can enlighten me about this! The URL they use looks like "www.XXXXX.com/".

[Air]

Cold fusion has it's own scripting language (CFML), some people use this capability to deliver custom pages to search engines. It works very much like Perl or VB custom page delivery code, but more like PHP, checking against known IP addresses to determine which page to serve.

This should make for an interesting discussion. There are quite a few that use cold fusion out there for web development, and some that use it or custom page delivery.

The real cold fusion experts will be along shortly ...

[Air]

Just as an add on in part from a prompt by NFFC (wish he would post ;) ) They are likely serving dynamic content. Pulling up keyword sets using cold fusion scripting from a database and serving up different pages constantly with these keyword sets.

I'm just guessing obviously, but if you are seeing the page the spider sees and every time you refresh, it changes, then what I'm describing is likely how it was done.

the urgent cry for cold fusion knowledge continues ...

[SimpleEnigma]

What do you want to know about Cold Fusion and Cloaking?? This is what I use for 99% of my sites :)

[DaveAtIFG]

Welcome Stuart! Lizzie started the thread with a big broad question and I was hoping to follow along and learn a bit. Air posted some speculation as to how the the site Lizzie described could be implemented. How close is he?

[SimpleEnigma]

Well, I am going to describe a site that I designed about 2 years ago. This site is no longer up as it was as much an experiment as anything else.

Cold Fusion is wonderful for gathering information from a database and giving you great tools to present the information. It also has a wonderful set of functions that allow you to do most anything. I personally think that it is easier to use than PERL or PHP.

So here goes what I once did, and would most likely never do again :) (Some of these technique no longer work)

The site had 13 domain names, each with relevant keyworks in the domain name. Each domain name had different colors nad graphics for it based on a variable called Server_Name. The first thing that I would do is a database quesy that got the information to change the logo, the background color, the text color and the links. Any human looking at the site would think that they were different sites, but designed by the same person.

Then I create doorways pages with the name of the page being one keyword. So I would have a file called keyword.cfm and it would call a master template, all of the keyword file would call one master template. The Master template would look at the variable called script name, which would return the name of the file keyword.cfm. With the script_name variable I could figure out what the keyword for that template was.

I then did a database query that had a keyword and one or two sentances about that keyword in the database. Using the keyword in a relevant sentance that was meaning full to the site. I would place that keayword in the Keywords META tag and then the sentance from the database in the begining of the BODY surrounded with a H1.

I would then choose a random number between 5 and 12 (as I remember it) and I would get that many random keywords out of the database. I would put those keywords in the keywords META tag and place the sentance from the databse in the BODY surrounded by an H1, H2 or an H3 that was randomly selected. This sentance would also be linked to the URL for that keyword's keyword.cfm file.

At the time AV was checking file sizes for changes and this method insured that AV would index these files every time that they saw them. (This was before the AV crashes of 2 years ago, Has it really been 2 years? or was it 1 really long year?)

This method also did good things for my link popularity. Since the colors and background, text and basically everything looked different between the site most SEs considered them different. Now they look at IPs and would see that it was only 1 site.

I could redesign this and impliment the database and templates in Cold Fusion in about 3 hours worth of work. That is another powerful feature of Cold Fusion.

Once I got into cloaking I found that checking for IPs, or the remote_addr variable, was just as easy as checking for any other variable. You can change anything and pull all the information out of a database and do it in just a few hours of work, if you know how ti set it up.

[SimpleEnigma]

Oh yeah,

and Cold Fusion has some Chacing features taht let you have a page be satic for a specific amount of time.

I have also written Algo that woudl allow me to have things change every sunday morning.

and there is a cflocation tage that will show you a different HTML with the same URL. i.e.

if (spider is true)
{Dynamic doorwaypage}
else
{cflocation to root URL}

It shows the keyword.cfm in the location feild of your browser, but it displays the HTML code for the index page. This can throw of the trail of cloak trackers :)

[floydstar2000]

Hi simpleEnigma

I have just begun to tech myself javascript and java, and what you said on cold fusion sounds really interesting, are there any sites you could recommend so i can get more info

Would be much appreciated.

[DaveAtIFG]

Thanks Simple Enigma! Until a few days ago, I only knew the name, Cold Fusion. Recent reading tells me it's a package, CF pages need to be hosted and delivered by a CF enabled server. Do users pay a premium for this hosting? (A quality "mainstream server" offering 25M can be had for $10 per month or less.)

It sounds as if the scripting language is VERY simple, yet VERY powerful and this got my attention! (I'm simple too, not powerful though:) ) Any links you can suggest for an intro to and/or examples of the scripting?

[lizzie]

Thanks, SimpleEnigma, it sounds pretty complicated to
someone who just learned html back around December.
I will tackle it if it will help me get lots of top
positions. Is the Cold Fusion itself patially responsible
for all the good rankings I see or is it still just
coming down to someone making great doorway pages and
then cloaking them? (Sorry, I wasn't able to follow
some of what you said.) It sounds like you are saying the
CF is making the doorway pages itself each time it sees
a spider.

[SimpleEnigma]

It is VERY possible for someone to create Cold Fusion templates to generate doorway pages from information in a database. YOu can do it with PERL or PHP or ASP as well, I just think that Cold Fusion is simplier to use and has as much more power as the others.

Cold Fusion Markup Language is a Tag based system, much like HTML. When you want to out put variables you hav eto surround them with < cfoutput > and < /cfoutput > tags. This makes it read a lot like HTML. If you hand code your HTML, I could have you inserting information into a database and getting that information back out of that database in about 20 minutes of training.

Like verything else Cold Fusion is just another tool. It will only make some of your processes easier and it will make everything seem more coplicated at first.

Allaire is the company that make Cold Fusion. You can get more information about it and links to some better place from [allaire.com...] and [fusebox.org...] has some interesting programming style information.

I host my own pages, so I'm not sure how much it cost of get Cold Fusion on your exisiting account. But I think that companies do offer it as an add on, like for $5 or $10 a month more. You'll have to check with the hosting companies.

[PeteU]

SimpleEnigma, can you set/edit html headers (file size and date) in Coldfusion?

[SimpleEnigma]

There is a tag called cfheader. The descriptiuon from the CF docs is this " ... CFHEADER generates custom HTTP response headers to return to the client."

I'm not sure of it's full functionality as I have never wanted to use this for anything. :)

I do know that by using a cfhttp as an http post you can use the cgi.user_agent variable to fake the agent. It's a bit tricker than it sounds as cfhttp is a pesky, yet very useful, comamnd. I originally discovered this with the idea that I wanted to write a spider in CF, I have since changed my mind on the usefulness of this. Cold Fusion would not be the best language to write a spider in.