It looks like cheating but it worked!

[Discovery]

A company I work with used an SEO company to promote a brand new website. There were no links pointing to the site, it had not been promoted in any way, and it was only 5 pages deep. The SEO had the site ranked in the top 5 on Yahoo, MSN, and Alta Vista in less than 4 days for over 20 top keywords, and I emphasise these are highly desirable keywords. I was amazed, so I looked into what they had done. In short, they placed 2 files in the root directory of the webserver. 1 a simple .asp file and the other a 404 error page. Within each page are simple requests for ServerVariables which they appended to a url and sent it all off to another website. This website has a processing page that determines if the visitor is a robot or not. From here I dont know what happens.

I dug into the code and reviewed the domain name where the processing URL page was located and found a reference to WebLinkAlliance.

Upon reading WebLinkAlliances offerings and how they achieve rankings it all sounded very similar to what occured on our site.

I have always been an advocate of conducting marketing in an ethical fashion, however that approach has left me with my rankings falling off the earth over the last 6 months and depending on PPC more heavily than I want to.

Am I falling to the dark side?
Has anyone heard of this technique being used?
What do you know about WebLinkAlliance?

Your input and advice is greatly appreciated.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

1) Spam works - thats the reason people spam! However, as you know it can be very risky and not something I would recomend anyone to do unless they are ready to throw away domains and IPs.

2) From what you are saying it is very likely that they did move into some risky areas - possibly cloaking and linkfarming. However, I can't be sure from the few details.


In any case, I urge you to find out what exactly has been done on your site. You have to know whats going on som YOU can decide if it's too risky or not. I would ask the SEO company to tell you what they did and what pages they have got indexed in your name - possibly on your domain. Have them explain to you the risks invlolved or if you are very carefull get a second opinion from another SEO.

[Wail]

It's cheating.

It's cloaking. Not very good cloaking at that. I checked out a URL at random from the testimonial section. Compare the site you see to the site that Googlebot sees. It's hugely different and therefore spam. They use "noarchive" tags to stop the page appearing in Google's cache so you'll have to visit the site and check the hard way.

These clients are in danger of getting booted from the search engine results.