How do I report a cloaking site?

[Vaughn]

Does Google have a specific email address for this? Any advise? :confused:

[Nick W]

My advice would be NOT to report it. For these reasons:

It wont do any good. G dont take action on those reports
You're almost certainly wrong
That's another webmasters site
You're better than that, make your site better than his :)


Let Google do their own work. Put it out of your mind and concentrate on destroying his website in the SERPS by being better.

btw, welcome to the forums :cool:

Nick

[Vaughn]

1. I'm not wrong
2. They're breaking Google's TOS
3. I can't beat a cloaked site by playing fair

[Nick W]

>>googles TOS
So? What does that have to do with you?

>>I can't beat a cloaked site by playing fair

Why?

Nick

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Google also tell my clients that I have to give unconditional money back guarantee. I don't. Now are you going to report me too? Are you giving that guarantee? :)

[seomike]

Unless it's a porn casino or some other wildly off topic site you can report it but you probably won't see it taken out of the results.

3. I can't beat a cloaked site by playing fair

You are wrong.

There is nothing magic under a cloaked site that regular on the page optimization can't beat. For one thing a cloaked site will have a harder time getting good link pop.

[projectphp]

>> Does Google have a specific email address for this? Any advise?
http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=spam&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 - which is at the bottom of every search results page.

>> 1. I'm not wrong
Given the arguments over cloaking, chances are, based upon someone's definition, you probably are :)

>> 2. They're breaking Google's TOS
Really? Which one: http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html. I think people get that a bit wrong.

>> 3. I can't beat a cloaked site by playing fair
Will turning into a snitch be more effective in helping you "beat" sites? How many sites would you need to catch to get to number one?

IMHO, this sort of "other" attitude, in which one's fate is inextricably linked tp what others do and outside of one's own control, is a massive problem with not only SEO, but our society in general. Anything that takes control out of your hands, and places it in many third party's is counterproductive.

Even if you can't "beat" a cloaker absolutely, there are many, many things you can do to improve your own situation, most of which are more time effective, and generate a far better ROI, than seeking out and reporting every bit of spam you can find.

Exhaust the possibilities to do what is in your control, and then worry about others, not the other way around.

By all means report cloaking if it makes you feel better. After all, it only takes a minute, just don't think this is the silver bullet that will make your online business "win", because it simply will not.

[dannysullivan]

Philisophical debate aside, if you want to report something as spam to Google, this is the specific page for that:

Report a Spam Result (http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html)

You can choose from various options, including that it is in your opinion a cloaked page.

[Nick W]

Absolutely Danny.

It's there specifically for webmasters. Not only can you report your fellow site builders, you can also throw a big red flag up on the whole section you work in :cool:
:

Genius on G's part.

Nick

[creativecraig]

Interested to know how you managed to catch out the cloaker? Was it just a simple user-agent cloaking site or did you manage to spoof the IP adderss correctly and get the correct response from their server.

Or are they just crap cloakers and they stuffed up in the results

[Marcia]

Once in a while they fail.

I once caught a site I'd been keeping a close eye on with it's pants down. I emailed the site owner right away with the URL of the cache and told him he'd better let his SEO know that the cloaking script was broken.

The site was very relevant for the search, right on topic. It's a lot more fun to let the folks know, knowing how they'll react. Besides you get a good education watching sites like that; I collect them in a bookmarks folder called "quality black hat sites".

Once you realize that it's just a normal part of the business, you grow up and stop getting your knickers in a wad over it.

[Chris_D]

Did you guys see this:

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20040928DidGoogleUnleashAdditionalGooglebots.html

I've said several times that a new spider, with a totally different UA string, from a new IP would give the game away. Maybe that's now happening?

[Incubator]

IMHO, I dont think the new bot has anything to do with cloaking, looks like a migration of a new bot possibly for backlinks or PR factors....I could be wrong

Also anyone that uses "cloaking" should be IP based, thus, if this new crawler string is not in the spider bot list to begin with, it would be sent to the original human page to begin with, that would be the nature of the cloak


....2 cents


Cheers

WC

[creativecraig]

Also anyone that uses "cloaking" should be IP based, thus, if this new crawler string is not in the spider bot list to begin with, it would be sent to the original human page to begin with, that would be the nature of the cloak


I wonder how long would it take and how much of their resources it would take up to cross reference the two databases for wildly different content?

Just a thought :)

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

This is definately not for de-cloaking purpose! For automated de-cloaking they would use public IP's (outside Googles normal IP ranges) and non-googlebot agent strings. This particular "new" bot took me 1 hit to identify and within 5 minutes all systems was adjusted.

De-cloaking on a broad scale, across an index of billions of pages, is NOT as easy as some might think - especially if you want to avoid having too many false positives. Most automated de-cloaking systems would also remove very prominent websites that use personalization, regionalization and tons of dynamic elements.