Entries from Search Engine Roundtable tagged with 'cloaking'

The years and years of Microsoft polluting web logs with fake referrer data, which they have 'fixed' numerous times, including a couple weeks ago. We had confirmed reports from webmasters that Bing was no longer showing up in the log...

Posted on September 10, 2009 8:08 AM

The topic of cloaking or IP deliver or useragent delivery is always a very touchy topic in the SEO industry. I am not going to get into the history, but in short, webmasters can use various methods to show GoogleBot...

Posted on September 4, 2009 8:30 AM

Brett Yount from Microsoft's Bing Webmaster team has commented here and in a Bing Forum thread saying the issue with the fake referrers being generated by MSNBot has finally been fixed. By finally, I mean, an issue dating back over...

Posted on August 31, 2009 7:58 AM

I normally don't get upset when I report about bugs with search engines, it is what I do. But I am really getting upset with Microsoft and their webmaster support with Bing, really. For the umpteenth time, Microsoft said they...

Posted on August 25, 2009 8:06 AM

Last night, Microsoft Bing representative, Brett Yount, said that they have rolled out a fix for the fake referrals or single word query issues people have been noticing. Brett said: We released a fix last night that should take care...

Posted on August 20, 2009 8:31 AM

Last week, we reported on what appears to be more cloaking tests by Bing, where referrer data for websites are being spammed (by Microsoft) with fake data. There have been more and more complaints about this in the Bing forums....

Posted on August 10, 2009 8:30 AM

A recent thread from the Bing Forums reports one webmaster noticing 150 plus referrers from MSNBot with the referring search query of "donate." They always come from a search result of www.bing.com/search?q=donate. The thing is, his site doesn't rank well...

Posted on August 5, 2009 8:45 AM

There has been a lot of Bing buzz on how the 'new' search engine is competing in the search landscape. But is that traffic all legit? Remember, since April 2007, Microsoft has been sending weird referrals to many webmasters. They...

Posted on June 25, 2009 8:23 AM

Gab Goldenberg from SEO ROI posted a thread at Google Webmasters Help discussion forums when he noticed Google began to drop his rankings for all his pages. I have been tracking the thread for about three weeks, but held off...

Posted on May 14, 2009 8:17 AM

I found a fun but serious SEO mistake in a Google Webmaster Help thread that I wanted to share with you all. But I felt it would be fun, if you had the time, to share at least one of...

Posted on December 18, 2008 8:17 AM

A Google Webmaster Help thread discusses a unique issue to a few niche sites that have no choice but to block all users from the United States while also wanting to allow GoogleBot to access the site. Since GoogleBot lives...

Posted on December 11, 2008 8:00 AM

Google's JohnMu from the Webmaster Central team has done a blog post named First Click Free for Web Search where he clarifies that the First Click Free program is allowed to be used for web search as well. In short,...

Posted on October 20, 2008 8:01 AM

Over the past few weeks, my brother and I have been working on a side project at RustyBrick on building out iPhone Apps. During this process, I took detailed notice to how iTunes works, how their API functions, and how...

Posted on August 22, 2008 9:13 AM

Yesterday, we reported that Google's John Mueller said that if you block a whole region from accessing your site, it would be considered cloaking and thus be against Google's Webmaster guidelines. Since then, we have seen many comments on that...

Posted on July 3, 2008 1:24 PM

A Google Groups thread has a webmaster who has been receiving a lot of rogue spider attacks from the Africa region. He wants to go as far as ban the whole continent of Africa. But he is concerned that by...

Posted on July 2, 2008 7:40 AM

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a blog post named How Google defines IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking. They cover topics such as making sure to treat Googlebot as a California resident with the Geolocation section, they go over IP...

Posted on June 3, 2008 9:52 AM

A Google Groups thread has discussion around how this webmaster should handle redirecting its web visitor to a localized version of their site, based on the IP address information. Since I recently wrote a comprehensive article at Search Engine Land...

Posted on May 22, 2008 8:09 AM

A Google Groups thread has several smart webmasters aiding a webmaster who found links on his site via the Google cache. In short, the links are not visible when viewing the page in the browser, but they are visible when...

Posted on March 13, 2008 6:21 AM

I noticed an update to the WebmasterWorld thread with the discussion of the weird referrals in the form of spam-like referrals coming from Live Search as cloaking tests. It appears a webmaster is now noticing a bot named MSLIVSOP serving...

Posted on January 14, 2008 7:27 AM

Yesterday we reported that MSNBot failed some reverse DNS tests. In short, if you did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP addresses of their spiders, it would not resolve to search.live.com. The big issue with this is that Webmasters...

Posted on December 6, 2007 7:20 AM

I have been corresponding with Microsoft about the weird spam-like referrals Live Search was sending to hundreds, if not thousands, of web site log files throughout the web. On September 6th, a Microsoft representative confirmed that these were actual tests...

Posted on December 4, 2007 3:00 PM

What would you do if you were targeting UK traffic and a US resident came along? You might, like a WebmasterWorld member, run into a pickle. The user targets UK traffic with AdWords but is also opted into a program...

Posted on November 5, 2007 9:09 AM

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there's any purpose to the 'noarchive' metatag in Google. Why use it? A few reasons are mentioned: Pages that are constantly updated should not be showing the wrong information in the cache so as not...

Posted on September 19, 2007 9:02 AM

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land site has been caught hiding text and performing "poor man cloaking" techniques. A WebProWorld thread called attention to the fact that Search Engine Land was hiding text in a CSS file: text-indent: -9000px; But Danny...

Posted on June 1, 2007 11:44 AM

digg_url='http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013579.html'; A WebmasterWorld thread links to a post at Agerhart.com showing screen shots of Yahoo! Autos cloaking. Cloaking is when a search bot is given one page of content, while a normal user is given another set of content....

Posted on May 22, 2007 8:05 AM

Often, when you view results from Google News or Yahoo! News you are taken to a site that normally would require you to register in order to view the content. But normally, you can view all the content right away,...

Posted on May 21, 2007 8:18 AM

Shimon Sandler wrote a post named Cloaking An Ecommerce Site where he asks, should you be allowed to cloak your e-commerce site for religious purposes. The situation is that some orthodox Jews shut down their web site on the Sabbath....

Posted on November 8, 2006 11:56 AM

Brian White, part of Matt Cutts webspam team, has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to continue the outstanding Google to Webmaster communication we have seen recently. Brian adds some more detail to our post yesterday on Web Hosts Found Cloaking...

Posted on August 15, 2006 7:11 AM

Web hosts are typically in a very powerful position. One such example is discussed at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread showing how one Webmaster was finding "strange results" in the Google search results pages. The results contained pornographic terms...

Posted on August 14, 2006 7:09 AM