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Cloaking? How is he doing it?

Different Google results for different keywords

         

SlyOldDog

4:25 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am extremely annoyed at my competitor. Mainly because he's smarter than me.

In the latest Google update he shows up with different page titles for different keyword searches, but the file name is always the same.

I assume when google crawls the page they only check it once, so how can the same page have a different cache for different keywords?

Confused!

volatilegx

4:40 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm not sure he's cloaking. I don't see how cloaking could cause more than one set of results to appear in Google for one filename. Maybe the different results are being caused by the "Google Dance" that happens during every update.

Brett_Tabke

4:45 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If it is 3rd level domains then it is probably wildcard dns where the search term goes into the thrid level spot. If just a directory /searchword/ then it is just a simple script that takes keywords and spits out pages based on that keyword. It's not real difficult to do. Used to be much bigger a few years ago before se's started banning wild card dns and anyone related to it.

volatilegx

4:51 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Brett - that might explain it if he is using different third level domains and/or directories to indicate different files to Google, but is he?

nipear

4:57 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It also could be he just changed title tags durring the last cycle a couple times. I have a site where I did that and google picked it up funny and I came up #1 for kw1 kw2 and also for kw3 kw2. This only happened for 1 page, and I think it was some kind of error by google...

SlyOldDog

5:11 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If it is 3rd level domains then it is probably wildcard dns where the search term goes into the thrid level spot.

Not sure what you mean here. When google crawls, there is no search term is there? Anyway, he is not using third level domains. It's his index page!

If just a directory /searchword/ then it is just a simple script that takes keywords and spits out pages based on that keyword. It's not real difficult to do. Used to be much bigger a few years ago before se's started banning wild card dns and anyone related to it.

Again - same as above. Google does not send keywords when they do a cache update, so I don't see how he sends the right page back to them.

It's not the google dance doing this, it's definately manipulation.

NameNick

5:47 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



SlyOldDog

If the keyword were used as a third level domain like this ...

keyword.domain.com

... a script (php, perl etc.) could recognize the keyword and set it as title in an html file.

Perhaps they have a file where they link to

keyword1.domain.com
keyword2.domain.com
keyword3.domain.com
keyword4.domain.com

and so on. All domains are pointing to the same file and if Google follows the links, there would be four different domains and pages.

NN

Brett_Tabke

5:50 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Ok SD, you mean in his Google listings, not the searches to his site?

SlyOldDog

6:25 pm on Sep 26, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Ok SD, you mean in his Google listings, not the searches to his site?

Yes. Google has several caches for 1 index page.

NameNick:
I think I see what you're getting at, but google would index each third level URL seperately. i.e each cache entry would point to the relevant 3rd level domain and not to the index page.

It seems google does not have a check to verify that they have only 1 cache for 1 page. This guy seems to have found a way to get the same page indexed more than once.

SlyOldDog

1:48 pm on Sep 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Is it possible this could happen if there were several index pages:

i.e index.htm index html index.jsp index.php etc?