17 of the 19 first results redirect to the same site

How is it possible in 2004?

[Allergic]

May be if the main keyword worth $30 to $90 in Adsense?

[Marcia]

>>How is it possible in 2004?

It's entirely possible in 2004 because Google simply isn't picking up on a lot of cloaked pages that are out there and in their index without the willing and able assistance of savvy SEOs with either a grudge or a penchant for righteousness letting them know about them. Or maybe they're just Matt Cutts (The Spam Czar) fans and want to cozy up. ;)

I just came across one this week sitting in a #1 spot for what certainly couldn't be considered a competitive search term by any stretch of the imagination - redirected to the homepage of a <cough> directory </cough> site.

Pity of it being that it took 30 seconds to figure the thing out, since what's in the cache is not at all the same as what you can see with view-source: in IE.

Are the pages you're seeing redirecting cached or not? Either way, check them out with view-source: in IE or with Opera with JS disabled (easiest of all to do in Opera) and see what you can see.

Then it's your personal choice whether to blow the whistle on them or use your find as a research/educational tool to figure out a bit about what's honing in on the algo.

[idoc]

To me an easy first start would be to delist the pages that disallow google caching of the content by robots.txt. There is no reason to do that unless to hide your source code displayed to the bots from the end page viewer. Second they need to do some hand-to-hand delisting of reported sites. It is not the severity of punishment but the certainty of it that will end this. Right now the only certainty is that cloaking works and there is no real consequence. Third, maybe google ought to think about penalizing the sites that the cloaks point to. Alot of affiliate sites currently enjoy this rogue traffic at no cost them currently.

Just a couple off the cuff ideas.

[Allergic]

Are the pages you're seeing redirecting cached or not?

No. The cached pages are almost all the same and been generated automacally. If you put the filter off you gonna have around 900 sites.

All thoses sites are about a disease and the scam is there for the lawyers site.

[creepychris]

You can't ban the site that is being redirected to because then you give people an easy way to ban competitors: buy a throw away domain and then cloak and redirect to a competitor.

[idoc]

You couldn't do it for just one or even a few inbound cloaks, I agree. There are *alot* of sites though that have thousands of cloaks coming from tens to hundreds of affiliate domains. I am not saying they should be *banned*... how about (p.r.= (p.r.'-5')) for these sites that these thousands of cloaks from tens to hundreds of domains point to. Removable when they clean house with their own affiliates... Then ('p.r.=0') the cloaking sites first time 90 days... next time 180 days... third time for life with no exceptions.

[Allergic]

When you look to the WhoIS owner of the site it is private info.
I'm sorry but the WWW is public.

The guy want to have hundreds of sites and thousands of pages been list on SERPs but do not want his name associate with his publics sites?

That is nonsense!

If I was Google, or any other SE, I will not accept anonymity.

[MikeBeverley]

I'm afraid that I have to agree that Google can't ban or penalise cloaked sites. It's too easy a way to have your competitors banned. This means that if they allow cloaking, spam sites get to the top by immoral means and if they ban cloaking, spam sites still get to the top by immoral means.

All Google can do is try to change their algorithm enough so that cloaking won't always be enough. Their recent shift to authority sites (hilltop?) certainly knocked out thousands of cloaks. I don't think that Google's algorithm has changed so that more cloaks are ranked higher, I think that the number of cloaks has risen dramatically now that they know Google don't ban them.

[Marcia]

There are good reasons for not allowing caching, that's an individual choice. Same with whois, some do it for purposes of privacy.

Cloaking in itself isn't what makes a page rank, it's what's being fed to the search engine that does it.

[idoc]

Seems to me the only reason to disallow caching would to be to have google index a page and yet remove any traces of the page indexed to the regular end user. I have a hard time seeing that as anything completely above board. If the webmaster of the site doesn't want the content on the www then why would google? Were I google...(of course I am not) I don't think listing such pages would be a priority... what with 4 billion pages to choose from.