Let me first preface this (skip down for the actual question) by saying that I do inhouse white/gray hat seo since a few years, so I don't get to learn or try much black hat seo. The cloak I'm seeing might be quite ordinary, but I don't understand how it works and my fellow whitehatters are happy with the explanation that it's simply "black hat" tactics and it's not something we need to understand...

I've however always been interested in how everything works, and I want to understand what's going on here, so any insight you can give me would be much appreciated.

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So I was doing a search for Kurt Greenbaum (the social media guy who screwed his rep a week or so ago) and cam across a type of cloaking/redirect I've seen before but don't really understand. (the domain starts with "walton" - not sure about the rules for posting urls here)

- The SERP points to an article that uses autogenerated spam content with Kurt Greenbaum as the main keyword (little over 8% density)

- When clicking through, I get redirected about 2/3 of the time to a search on Kurt Greenbaum on some other site which redirects to a third site

- Entering the URL directly in the browser instead of clicking through from the SERP (or just refreshing the page) does not trigger the redirect

Here are the parts that confuses me:

- Cloaking checkers do not show the url the SERPS are pointing to to be using any cloaking

- checking backlinks with yahoo for the domain shows up a lot of sketchy pages from legit looking domains (most of them seem to have broken CSS links leaving only bare html) - but none actually have any links to the spammy domain in their source code

I'm sure this will disappear fairly soon, but I'm really curious how this works. Even if I don't necessarily want or can use these methods I think it's important to fully understand them...and I don't at all :P

can anyone give me some insight on what's going on? Would love to find some ppl to discuss this kind of stuff with because most ppl I come in contact with professionally have a "don't need to know and don't care" attitude toward it

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for the cloaking part i think they use a "redirect only these IPs and randomly and only if they came from google" instead of "always redirect if agent is not googlebot"

for the backlink part there are just A LOT of ways of hiding links.. think of all AJAX for example

hope this helps.

Unless this "Cloaking checker" is on a Google server, it's not very useful.

Also i'm 70% asleep so I didn't understand your post completely.