How is this possible?

Ok, here's the situation. I stumbled upon a site in one niche, let's say it is about toothbrushes. It has been around for 10 yrs and is completely legit. However, I look at the link profile and see like 2mil links with anchors about fur coats. No wonder they are on the first page for fur coats, even thought the site and all its content is about toothbrushes. So when I search for 'fur coats'

Page title: Amazing fur coats for sale
www. toothbrushes. com

Click on the result, and sure enough, I'm taken to a site selling fur coats.

Type in the browser window www. toothbrushes. com or http://www., or http:// etc, and I'm taken to a totally legit toothbrush manufacturing site. However, the link profile tells me something is going on.

Spider the tootbrush site, check ahrefs...no 301's listed, no obl's to the fur coat site...nothing.

How is this possible...I'm impressed.

You are looking at the wrong figure.

He is cloaking the site. Download this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/

Then choose googlebot as your user agent and you'll see what the page looks like for google crawler.

It's not unlikely to stumble upon such techniques in competitive niches. To me they often look like either hacked or bought websites that all have a very good amount of age to them along with high toolbar pr which I'm guessing comes from a previously good backlink profile before the blast was started.

Yes, that's what I thought too, but no cloaking detected. To elaborate, if I type in toothbrush fur coat:

1) Buy Fur Coats
www. toothbrushes .com --> I go to fur coat site (HOWEVER if I just retype www. toothbrushes. com into the browser, I go to the toothbrush site instead of the fur coat)

2) Best Toothbrushes
toothbrushes .com -->I go to toothbrush site

christianbed said:

Yes, that's what I thought too, but no cloaking detected. To elaborate, if I type in toothbrush fur coat:

1) Buy Fur Coats
www. toothbrushes .com --> I go to fur coat site (HOWEVER if I just retype www. toothbrushes. com into the browser, I go to the toothbrush site instead of the fur coat)

2) Best Toothbrushes
toothbrushes .com -->I go to toothbrush site

Click to expand...

They've made it so all visitors from google are redirected to the fur site. If you type in http://www.toothbrushes.com, then you're not accessing it from google, hence why you're not redirected.

Interesting, thanks for the replies. I'm not clear what the advantage is of cloaking compared to simply keeping the original site as-is and adding a homepage link or just 301-ing it to the MS. The 'how to' doesn't interest me as much as the 'why' in this case...what is the rationale?

Seems logical to me. The site owner realizes he ranks well for fur coats on a site which doesn't convert well for people looking for fur coats. He therefore does a selective redirect on visitors referred from Google to a more fitting website. He doesn't care very much about redirecting the direct traffic.

I don't see any 2mil links with anchors about fur coats also this site was not ranking for this KW. Where you r checking

^^I was using a hypothetical...outing people's sites here is a no-no.

Do you know how long it's been like this?

Btw, I love your site. Christians and sex toys all the way!

ZennoBlaster said:

Do you know how long it's been like this?

Btw, I love your site. Christians and sex toys all the way!

Click to expand...

Ha, thanks. I've been meaning to sanitize the product descriptions/photos a bit because it is still pretty X rated in some areas. I'm just ridiculously busy with other projects. Anyway, the site in question has been ranking for about a year...