Dodging Manual Spam Reports Part 1: Redirection
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Alright. So whether or not Google likes to admit it, almost every site examined or banned for linkspam/cloaking is a manual review. I’ve seen cloaked domains indexed since 2002, and I’ve seen them get banned in 2 weeks. What’s the difference between the two? Link spam.
Pissy admins have been the beign of the blackhat’s existence for probably as long as the blackhat has existed. They report spam, investigate domains, and occasionally even take it a step farther and even bring down entire link networks. They’re not terrible good at what they do, but normally dropping a link on 50,000+ sites will leave you with at least one that knows what the hell he’s doing.
So how do we get around this? Well, I’ve decided to have a little series giving various ways. Consider this part 1.
How the Forum Admins Find Spam to Report
To all the blackhats in the audience, check your log files. Isolate all IP addresses that accessed from a non-search engine(aka link spam) referrer. Then isolate those that did. Find crossover IPs in the list. You’re sure to find a lot of people that hit both. These are your enemies. They first click the link spam itself, and correctly get shoved off to an error page. Then they search for your keyphrase(or worse yet, site: commands) on the search engines, and try to enter organically. This is where we find our problem.
The Solution
Pages that contain the meta noindex tag can still accrue link juice, pagerank, and everything else. During the sketchy parts of your promotion, consider telling Google to crawl, but not index your pages. Let it sit for a bit, until all the hubub dies down. After you see a decrease in spammy referrers showing up, use a permanent redirect to a cleaner domain. Cloak the redirect, so only Google sees it as a permanent redirect. Everyone else gets a lovely 404 page, same as normal. Your real site may show up in the site: command for your spam domain(I haven’t checked, but recall this to be true), but that’s ok. It will be explained in the next section.
Why Does This Work?
It takes time to submit spam reports. One cannot submit spam reports for domains that have yet to show up, or domains that are not indexed. It would take forever, and waste a lot of Googles time if people were to do this.
While they CAN find it via the site: command(I believe), normally the domain NOT being the link spammed domain is more than enough to offset a fair number of admins from reporting the spam. Past that, 99% of the admins that would have reported you already didn’t, since you waited before doing the perma redirect to your clean domain. Most that were going to investigate already would have.
Are there Variations on this?
Yes, dozens. I do not advocate linkspamming a domain that immediately does a permanent redirect to the real domain simply because in the past I’ve had limited success with this.
Are There any Downsides?
Yes. Increased cost(it takes 2 domains), and it may take googlebot longer to come back to a domain where it was previously given the noindex tag.
Is That the End of the Entry?
Yup. Thought I’d return to the blackhat roots for a bit. Look forward to part 2.
-XMCP
March 5th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Very interesting. Again you prove why you are my favorite SEO blog. Stumbled and Sphunn.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I’d just do a second “layer” of cloaking to 404 anything with the domain name in the search string.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I prefer to just cloak my pages so that anyone that doesn’t come from a SE (other then google bot) gets a “This account has been suspended due to abuse” page. That normally keeps people from submitting spam reports.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:56 am
On the page that you are bouncing non SE traffic to couldn’t you drop a cookie on the visitor, then if they attempt to access your pages via an SE, check for that cookie and bounce them off to the “suspended” page again?
March 6th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Yeah, you could. But it would seem a bit odd if a 404 page dropped a cookie…it works though. Whitelisting large ISP proxies then blacklisting snoopers works quite well too.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
# I3lackI-Iat says:
March 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I prefer to just cloak my pages so that anyone that doesn’t come from a SE (other then google bot) gets a “This account has been suspended due to abuse” page. That normally keeps people from submitting spam reports.
you talk so much about this so its not an option anymore for admins to stop submiting reports..
April 28th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
@bhbh: I can assure you that my traffic is not large enough to have that kind of impact.
And yes, it still works.