Mediabot cloaking?

cloaking to influence Adsense content?

[fdev]

I ran into a site that consists of an Adsense block, a long article, and at the bottom are a bunch of links for an assortment of unrelated topics (Stocks, Vitamins, Loans, Flowers, etc.)

The links simply pass the topic in this manner: index.php?q=stocks

When you click a link, the AdSense ads switch to that topic, yet nothing else on the page changes (including the unrelated article which remains exactly the same.) The topic is nowhere to be found in the html.

Is it likely that the site is using cloaking techniques to detect Mediabot and then feeding it content to influence the ad content or is there something else going on?

[volatilegx]

Hi fdev and welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

The URL affects the ads being served by Adsense. This is a clever way of trying to get ads for a specific keyword.

[Friday]

If you wanted to do something REALLY nefarious, you could cloak for those Websites that compare product prices (you know who you are!).
8-P

I wouldn't encourage it as a marketing strategy, but if everyone did it, we could put those SOBs out of business and they would stop stealing our SERPS!
:-)