OK, this is just a quickie post I wanted to get out while it was on my mind…..
I’d never heard of TagSum before today, but came across some interesting stuff they are doing to manipulate the SERPs…..
I was doing an unrelated search today and came across pages from: www.facebook.automotivearena.com…I was curious enough to click through and see what the site was, but it jumped me directly to tagsum.com
Obviously TagSum is doing some cloaking and redirecting….
Now click any result. You’ll see it redirects you to tagsum.com
Go back to the SERP and copy and paste any of the urls into your location bar and instead of getting hopped to TagSum.com you get a page with the stereotypical:
This Account Has Been Suspended
Interesting eh? So they are recognizing clickthroughs from Google and are jumping those to TagSum.com whereas other traffic gets shown the This Account Has Been Suspended.
For more insight into what they are doing, take a look at the google cached snapshot for any one of those pages.
Someone should tell them that by dumping a bunch of links to their other cloaked domains in the footer, they are literally handing google their cloaking network on a silver platter. At the very least, lump in links to your other cloaking domains in the body where they’re harder to recognize amongst other legitimate links.
Now that I write this post, I think to myself: Should I feel bad for outing these guys? Am I just a pilthy little nark? I don’t think so. All I know is that their cloaked pages are competing with some of my niches by displacing some of my high ranked pages. So fuck ‘em.
***UPDATE: Apparently someone from TagSum.com paid me a visit because they’ve stopped jumping all their cloaked domains to TagSum.com. Wow….I never realized people actually paid attention to what I write here.
A further piece of (pretty obvious) advice for comment readers:
When you are cloaking domains, always ALWAYS include the tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
That way, google won't *publically* cache your site and that makes it alot harder for assholes like myself to hand you your own ass by outing you in a snarky blogpost like the one above.
Filthy spammers. Looks like they turned the jump back on. You'd think if they could manage setting that up they would be smart enough to noarchive it.
Filthy?? I wouldn't go that far.
no offense, but i dont think you should have outed another blackhat.
in my experience interlinking like that can yield really good results, but i agree that he shouldnt have dumped them all in the footer. in my own network of sites, i mix them in with an emulated updates page that i have regenerated each day.
cheers.
Hey look Taky, it's the worlds smallest violin………………..
Do us all a favor and keep your opinions on your own blog and off of mine.
pretty lame outting another blackhat.
sounds like you are a jealous piece of shit to me.
My opinion?
If someone is getting in the way of my profits, I dont give a damn who they are or what 'hat' they wear.
If you little whiners don't like it, don't read my blog.
these guys need to get a grip. if i was stupid enough to leave such obvious traces of my cloaking, i figured id would deserve to be outed. if someone was competing with my websites, i would do the same thing. theres no rules to this game, just winner and loosers. taky micky and john sound like loosers to me.
hes not getting in the way of your profits. if you knew anything about blackhat (or wh for that matter) youd know that it turns words and terms into money. there are an infinite amount of terms to be hit, and if you find the ones with competition, if (read if) you are skilled at seo, you can compete and outrank them.
so if some webmaster is doing cloaking to generate traffic your going to post it on your blogs? you may has well have reported him to google, if you didnt. that may have been the first time youve seen something like that but i can assure you that there are other seos who are well versed and see that kind of thing all day. making a blog post about it shows your ignorance and how new you are to blackhat techniques.
keep up the great blog posts on how to use google, idiot.
cheers.
I love it when folks like taky make a few dollars at adsense and all of a sudden they think that their opinions matter.
Taky, owning a blackhat page on wordhugger doesn't make you a subject matter expert, it makes you a marketing whore.
At the end of the day, and once Taky gets over himself and the dust settles, I feel bad if I've offended some people's delicate sensibilities by giving an example of cloaking in the wild. But, fact is: Dude fucked up his cloaking. If a few people read this post and learn how to do it with more eloquence in the future, then the post is worth something.
Regardless, I could give a shit about nay-sayers saying nay because like the title of my blog suggests, I'm about keeping things democratic and giving people equal access to knowledge. SEO (especially blackhat SEO) shouldnt be some oligarchy, or kleptocracy….I don't believe there are any topics that should be off limits. That said, I am willing to admit that perhaps I shouldn't be so blunt with my posts in the future.
I’ve given this some serious consideration and have decided to not edit this post, because whats done is done, and I HATE the idea of censoring myself….but yeah, I guess I’d be well advised to be less specific in the future
i know the owner of wordhugger. i got that page for free.
you do know i post at syndk8 under a name that isnt "taky" now, dont you?
wise decision not to out another blackhat, nonetheless.
i dont believe there should be any censorship of blackhat knowledge either, but i will sensor the methods that make me money. cloaking nothing new, and people have been doing it for a longtime now. in fact i would go as far as to say that it may be a dying breed nowdays, but it brings in traffic for longtail phrases when your real tld is white. its a great traffic building strategy for those users who are not seo savvy to follow your links, and great because it doesnt penalize your domain and allows you to do some whitehat ranking stuff. the best seos are a complete gradient of white to black.
i think you should edit the post at the very least. if someone shot someone else on the street, and you were screaming to everyone on the block and calling everyone you knew saying, "hey, james shot john". do you think the police would catch him, eventually?
cheers
I will weigh in just cause i have a big fucking mouth
I really think that both sides of the arguement has merit; but when it comes down to it, this is a very old techinque that can easily be done not only with custom apps but also with very affordable off the shelf proggies too. So if this guy was too lazy/cheap/dumb enough not to implement it properly than I think it's fair game and also a way to illustrate to all how NOT to implement cloaking and everyone learns. Not to mention the lazy/cheap/dumb web master gets a chance to fix it for matty c drops the hammer on him cause someone else found out about it. So in reality it's a win/win for everyone. If my shit was all wrong and fubar'd i sure as hell wish someone would blog about it for all to read so that I might be movtivated to fix my shit.
LOL….taky compared cloaking to a shooting. Hilarious.
Taky, your opinion has been noted, and duly ignored.
Okay okay settle down boys. So now that I got some useful info from this post (i.e. I made sure to check all my templates so they include noarchive…damn I missed a bunch), what's next? Always something good on this blog…
dub dub dub taking a fucking link
lol
I've known about this scam since the start. They started and still run "SimplifiedSEC dot com" which is a large blackhat site that generates fake content by stealing the content off sites in the SERPS. They charge a $69 monthly fee to use it and if you dont pay all the sites you host there are redirected to tagsum.com they also redirect their forums and blackhat sites to tagsum too. The links on the bottom is from their interlinking script that generates random links for their sites to help get more crawler hits and ranking. I know because I used to be a member of their sites.
So…is simplifiedsec a scam or not ? Can you actually make money paying the 69 USD per month ????
From what I've heard, some people have experienced real success with it, and some have totally blown a wad of cash. At 69 a month, it certainly doesnt hurt your pocket book to give it a chance.
lol i know the owner of tagsum. the no archive tag is used on purpose.
as for the interlinking, yea it would probally be better to have the links in the text.
the interlinking is just a script made by some on of the forums.
Andrew J it is not a scam, if you joined and dident make any money then you have fucked up some where along the line.