Alex Pooley's Blog

I came across a blog today using an ingenious “cloaking” technique. He’s stuffed his “about” page at the top of all his pages and then hidden the section using javascript. So when you click on his “about” link, the top part of the site scrolls down to reveal information about his site, rather than going to a new page.

Here’s what the Red Cardinal blog looks like before clicking on the about link.

Here’s what happens after you click the about link.

I’ll be sure to use this technique on my sites from now on.

I came across a couple of choice paragraphs last night while reading a book about Google’s PageRank. This book is written by a couple of academics, and not by Internet Marketers looking to spin junk.

These two paragraphs below discuss different methods of ranking outlinks with some sort of priority ranking, such that one link is valued more than another.

This first paragraph, highlighted in yellow, says that a “practical” method of ranking out links is to track what links people are actually clicking on a page to determine the true value of each link on that page. Could this be part of the reason Google supply an Analytics package? After all, a more accurate ranking of out links leads to a more accurate overall PageRank.

If this is true, then for the black hatters:

1. Add link on third party page that is using Google Analytics
2. Click through link many times to inflate importance of out link on the page.

This next paragraph discusses research ranking out links by the location of the link on the page, the length of the anchor text, and the similarity between the page and the page the link points too. We’ve all read about the importance of spamming linking with anchor text, but it’s nice to see it derive from the world of academia.

The non-highlighted bit goes on to suggest that page similarity could be determined by the angle between two representative vectors of the current page, and the linked page. The interesting point being that the PageRank algorithm would then be inherently bound with the content analysis system which also suggests an importance on linking with thematically related pages.

The book is titled “Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The science of search engine rankings” by Langville and Meyer. There’s plenty more to this book so I’ll be sure to post anything else of interest.

A couple of final points worth making:

• What Google choose to implement and what is pure theory will always remain a trade secret and will require real life experimentation.
• If Google are still using the PageRank algorithm as described in this book, then any possible influence of domain age, Class C IPs, domain TLD, etc are quite limited. I’ll save the gory details for another post!

A cloaked page is a page that looks different depending on who, or what, is viewing the page. Black hat spammers will show an innocent page to a Google robot, but a more devious page to real users. Below, is an example of BlinkList gaming Google to “buy viagra”. From what I can determine, BlinkList is the one performing the cloaking, and not one of BlinkList’s users.

Here’s my search for “buy viagra” in Google:

Here’s what I get when I click through from Google:

Here’s what I get if I type in the URL manually:

Strangely, I can’t pull up a count of their backlinks because Yahoo site explorer silently redirects my backlink query to Yahoo search. Is Yahoo on to them?

BacklinkWatch tells me there are 4,489 backlinks.

I’m impressed they’re ranking with such few links for such a competitive term.

If you can offer any more insight please add to the comments.

TechCrunch has a profile on BlinkList.