What's the Benefit

[laddman1]

I recently did a search for "mysite" and found a few weird pages. I'm sure its probably cloaking. Basically the pages go to a competitor website. So I used the google translator to see the original html.

Its basically just a list of links that go to related pages. My site is a part of the list. It has the google logo on top and says that they are google results.

So I'm wondering how this benefits the end user in terms of rankings. Does it help?

I guess they did a poor job cause it's easy to see who's doing it and who may be benefiting.

I'm new to this cloaking thing so any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[volatilegx]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

What they are doing is querying Google for a specific phrase, and taking the results and them for content. This probably violates Google's terms of service and most likely copyright law, too.

The possible benefit is that the 'content' generated will be keyword-rich and might rank well on Google.

Since they are cloaking, the average person will just see your competitor's home page, while search engine spiders are seeing the stolen content.

This type of behaviour is really reprehensible. If they had any kind of ethics at all, they wouldn't be doing it. Not only is it spam, but they are violating copyrighted property.