MFA sites cloaking

beware of sneaky advertisers trying to avoid your competitive filters

[koan]

I just noticed a new (?) breed of MFA sites. They display different content according to their visitors origin. For example, if they come from search engines, by default, the pages have pretty decent content, unobstructed by spammy ads, if at all. However, if you visit them through an Adsense link (using the preview tool or an clicking an ad), they turn into really spammy sites, where the same pages become dynamic (ex index.html becomes index.html?referer=adsense_content) and show big "sponsored results" blocks with limited legitimate text instead of their original content.

Just to let you know in case you're checking sites for your competitive filters. Sometimes they can look good on the surface if you visit them simply from their domain names, but not if you visit them using their ad links.

[zett]

Absolutely second this. ALWAYS use the preview tool to evaluate a landing page of an "advertiser". And be prepared for some surprises when doing so.

One of the alltime classics is that advertiser who really messes around with the visitors browser once the visitor tries to use the product as intended (i.e. entering a query and hit the "Search" button). It first opens a new window to get rid of the back-button and then turns itself into full-screen mode, so that any browser navigation is gone. All you see is there spammy page now. The window has no browser history, so right-clicking is no help at all (the "back" option is greyed out). The only way out for users: clicking one (or more?) sponsored ads, or shooting down the browser window. That guy is operating from a beautiful Caribbean island BTW, so =we= as honest publishers are definitely doing something wrong.

Needless to say, Google never acted upon them.