SEO SCAM

Another spammer found! Google penalty applied!

2008-03-06T05:30:00.008-06:00

The website at http://www.xtoysusa.com/ is under google penalty for hiding text from visitors on it's homepage.

Where is this hidden text located on xtoysusa.com homepage?
Look in to the HTML source code(right click -> view source).
In the beginning of BODY tag you'll see two paragraphs contained in < class="IntoText">.
And CSS class for "IntoText" is defined as following:
.IntoText {
display: none;
}
It means that visitor can not see this text in his browser, but search engines like google - can see!

How should you know that there is a penalty from google applied to this website ?
As you can see the homepage itself has a PR0(pagerank zero value), and any other page of this website has PR0 or no pagerank, grey PR(N/A). But how could this be when xtoysusa.com has hundreds of incoming links pointing to it? You can see that by checking links to xtoysusa.com on yahoo. It means that entire website have been penalized.

And again, if you have a link to this penalized website(xtoysusa.com), you should remove it to prevent your rankings from being suffered from linking to bad neighborhood.

Here is what google says about linking to bad neighborhoods:
Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

How to find out where is the link to xtoysusa.com on you website ?

Easy way to check if you still link to this spammer from you website:
Simply put this query in http://www.yahoo.com/ search form:

linkdomain:xtoysusa.com site:mywebsite.com

Don't forget to replace mywebsite.com to your domain name in that query.

Do you still have a link to spammer's website ?

2008-02-22T06:54:00.015-06:00

Well, if so, just read some of my recent conversations with webmasters and web owners who already have removed all links to discreet-romance.com from their websites to be safe in the future:

"John,
I wanted to let you know that we will have their link removed from our site by the end of the day. I have also reported them as spam to both Google and Yahoo.
Website Director,
http://www.xandria.com/"

"Hi John.
We dont link to discreet romance as far as i know.
Can you let me know where the link is if so?
Regards.
http://www.fetishwear-uk.co.uk/
------------(after my reply)------------
Hi Thanks.
I have removed the page, this was on the server from the old site.
Cheers."

"Could you please tell me where on my sites you found link to discreet-romance.com ?
Thanks for information!
http://www.fleshlightlive.com/
------------(after my reply)------------
Thanks again.... link has been removed!"

"Hi John,
Thanks for the head's up. I have a ton of sites that may have links.
Do you know which ones you found links on that have my contact email address?
Thanks.
------------(after my reply)------------
[no answer, link removed],
http://www.joyourselfcams.com/"

"Your message looks like spam, but I decided to answer you.
I don't think that I link to his site from any of my sites.
------------(after my reply)------------
Thanks. I deleted his link.
http://www.sexblogsworld.com/"

"Hi,
Thanks a bunch for the info. I have went ahead and removed their link. Its a shame as we do get traffic just from the link itself. But that was not the main goal. Anyway we really appreciate you letting us know and I will be sending google a spam report!
Thanks again,
http://www.AdultSensations.ca/"

"Hello John,
Thanks for information. It is really useful.
Have you sent this warning to all webmasters who exchange links with them?
Best Regards,
Michael"

"Thanks for the email... Link has been removed but I am curious as to why you notified folks letting them know?"
http://www.femalecompanions.com/"

"I got what you meant by visiting your blog. I have
just deleted the link to Discreet-romance.com
Thanks a million
http://www.funpcgame.com"

Let us help each other to build the web of good quality!

2008-02-08T10:34:00.000-06:00

Now when the webmaster of discreet-romance.com is trying to convince all of us that he is not cheating any more by removing some visible parts of cheating, I would definitely never link to it again. Besides, if I still had the link - I would remove it without any hesitations. Why? Because spammer will never turn into a "good guy" if he managed to reach the top by cheating the rest of us. Some day he'll do this again, and again.

In the end - this is a shame to link to such website who cheated hundreds, may be even thousands of others. Many webmasters have already removed the link to this website and appreciated my investigation.

You can checkout complains and comments of other webmasters on some SEO discussion forums:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=680872
http://www.askdamagex.com/showthread.php?p=240673
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?p=168546
http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/78804-how-rank-1-google-simple-technique-works-100-a.html

Let's punish the spammer and remove any links to discreet-romance.com,
so he would never cheat us again!

And be free from the possibility of being penalized by search engines for linking to a spammer's website.

peace.

One cloaking has been removed, another added, now accross entire website discreet-romance.com !

2008-02-06T09:07:00.000-06:00

So, it seems like webmaster of discreet-romance.com has removed cloaking from his links directory, but who cares ?! What if he do this again one day ? I'll never be sure now, because it was there already once, and may happen anytime again in any form. Besides, the website is still full of cloaking, you can compare the source code of any page as seeing by googlebot and by human. You'll find a lot of interesting differences there.

For example for googlebot he hides two image links in header:
1. scan alert, hacker safe link:
https://www.scanalert.com/RatingVerify?ref=www.discreet-romance.com

2. Link to internal page:
http://www.discreet-romance.com/privacy.php

Also he hides google analytics tracking code located at the end of the source code of each page.

But there is more!
Take a look at their footer on homepage, right after this phrase: "All models are 18 years of age or older. 2257 Compliance Notice". You can not see anything right? Now take a look at the source code of the page, and you'll find more hidden links:

1: http://www.steamywindows.co.uk/
2: http://www.discreet-romance.com/annasadultdirectory.php

But googlebot can not find even them, they are not available for google, cloaked again.

And the last but not least: the second link points to an automatic link exchange directory for adult websites! And again all of link exchange partners from the directory are screwed by discreet-romance.com along with the website that provides the directory to discreet-romance.com.

So now we have a spammer website that violates lots of google's quality guidelines:
1. Cloaked pages
2. Hidden text and links
3. Participating in link exchange schemes

Now the website enjoys first positions on google by many popular keywords!
We all should report it to google until it is gone from the results and remove any links to it.

If you have a link to this website, ask yourself a question: do you still want to link to this website and wait until google penalize it along with your website?

Discreet-romance.com screwed all of its link partners by cloaking pages. See how they do it.

2008-01-24T18:00:00.000-06:00

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE">

So you'll never see them in google's cache!
And you'll never know that you've been cheated!

How to identify cloaking?

2008-01-24T15:20:00.000-06:00

Try this out for yourself and see how discreet-romance does it.

The experiment was conducted using Mozilla Firefox/2.0 browser with plug-in [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59] that allows substitution of the user agent for HTTP request.

Facts and Findings:
About 70 URLs from the domain discreet-romance.com (see the list here) were found to respond with different content depending on the user agent in the HTTP request header.

The user agents tested:
a. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11.
b. User-Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
c. User-Agent: Slurp/2.0 (Yahoo! Slurp http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp).
d. User-Agent: MSNBOT/0.1 (http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

The cloaked content generated by Mozilla user agent represent extensive list of links to multitude of external web sites.

The cloaked content generated by Googlebot user agent represent mostly same page, as viewed by Mozilla, with ALL external URLs gone or replaced with the internal URLs from discreet-romance.com domain.

Google defines “cloaking”: “Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index….” [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355]

Linking to bad authority websites may harm your search engine rankings

2008-01-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

So, you have a link directory on your website for link partners who link back to your website. Did you ever thought that it may harm your search engine rankings? Yes, it can and it does! See google's quality guidelines: "Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Why? Because all websites across the web link to each other by reciprocal links or multi way links. And among them there are websites which violate search engine's quality guidelines and being penalized for such behavior. If you link to a penalized (partially penalized) website, that penalty applies to your website too! Even if you don't link directly to a penalized website, but you link to a website that links to penalized website - you get a small amount of that penalty through the entire link chain that passes the penalty of penalized website.

That is one of the most critical factors that search engines like Google use to rank our websites nowadays. So, when you want to link to any website, first of all analyze it, determine whether it is an authority one and think twice before linking to it.

Linking to websites like www.discreet-romance.com that severe violate quality guidelines by cloaking it's pages is sure way down in search engine rankings!

Good luck! See you at the top!

Open Letter To link partners of Discreet-romance.com. Google penalty is likely

2008-01-22T10:17:00.000-06:00

Discreet-romance.com does CLOAKING and you exchanged links with them.

Details:

You can see your link on discreet pages, but Googlebot, Yahoo or MSN - cannot.

This is simple user-agent cloaking. All details on the blog: http://cloaking-google.blogspot.com/.

Why should I worry?

1. Discreet-romance.com screws your link exchange agreement. You give them value but they do not return anything.

2. When major SE finds out and penalize the scammer, your site could go down with them too by link association.

What can I do?

To be safe, take your link to discreet-romance.com down asap. Email me back if you cannot find it, I have the whole list.
Report them:

Read detailed report and investigation on the blog: http://cloaking-google.blogspot.com/.

Best

John McLovin (love the movie).