Does Referer Cloaking Catch You Penalties?
If you've had a chance to play with the Cloaked Content Generator, another lovely blackhat concotion from the infamous Esrun, and ever wondered if you could simply switch the $agent variable to read, $HTTP_REFERER instead of $HTTP_USER_AGENT and not get penalized for cloaking then this experiment is JUST for you!
OK so here's what I did. Open a new browser tab/window and visit this page from a search engine (ie. site:adammoro.net/seo/experiments/referer-cloaking-penalties.php), click the result, and tell me what you see...
Experiment Timeline
6-13-2008 (2:19pm): Experiment started.
6-14-2008 (11:34am): The page is indexed in Google (no Yahoo or Live yet…what a shocker). Google says they indexed it 21 hours ago which would be VERY shortly after I posted this experiment page (hey who'd a thunk?! Twitter CAN come in handy for SEO!).
6-17-2008 (11:34am): The page is no longer in Google's index. Not sure if it disappeared today or yesterday but it's gone. Looks like Referer cloaking can catch you penalties with Google. As far as the other engines, Yahoo's now displaying the page in results and MSN has yet to index it.
