Isn't this spamming? What is he doing?

[schott2]

I'm currently working for a network marketing company which markets discount health benefits. One of consistent top producers (in enrolling memberships) does so online. He is not on the first page on either Google or Yahoo for the most productive keywords in our business [dental plan(s)].

I did however stumble upon something in my quest to find his "gold mine". I typed in "dental plna" and viola! The 2nd and 3rd results in YAHOO! go to his enrollment site. What bothers me though is how he is able to do it. Our replicated sites used for enrollment won't allow a lot of editing to get these words in there. Is he using some sort of ghost site or redirection for this. Yahoo! shows a different URL than what it actually send you to.

Anyone know this technique and how he is able to accomplish this?

Thanks for your insight....

Brian

[ADAM Web Design]

For starters, you're absolutely right; it is spam on the part of William (or does he go by Bill? It seems to alternate) Simms. He's a dirty little rascal, that one!

What he's doing is using a redirect from one to the other. I believe (and I'm not sure on this, so don't hold me to it) that the redirect is written directly to the headers of the browser; this would allow browsers to see the AmeriPlan content whereas the search engine spiders, having no headers to be written to, would read and index the crappy spammy page.

I'm not sure of the exact technical details, but simply put the user sees something search engines don't.

But that's not all our boy Billy is doing. See, Billy's been a bit of a bad boy.

He's got the following domain names registered to him:

dentalbrokers.com
Affordablebenefits.com
TeamForLife.com

All of which feed (directly, or via user input) into his AmeriPlan affiliate site.

And has he ever been spamming his links! He's got them in all sorts of nasty places that he shouldn't have them in.

Someone should give him a bigtime spanking for this.

[adbart]

Lol.

Aside from Adam's tips on S&M there, you should report this guy to Google and they'll check it out.

[schott2]

Thanks for the info guys.

I read something in the past about software or a company that offered a service which dynamically generated pages based on the keywords a user types into a search query. The pages were generated instantaneously and optimized for those keywords input into the search box.

Obviously, it would be difficult to get in the front of the results for highly competitive keywords. So, he was smart enough to try capitalizing on the misspelled words of many different keyword combinations realizing that 10-20% of all searches are done with people who just can't spell (myself included).

Anyway, thanks again for the advice...

Brian

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by adbart

Lol.

Aside from Adam's tips on S&M there, you should report this guy to Google and they'll check it out.

What can I say? I'm a dominant personality. :)

[adbart]

lol thats just scary.

[thecat]

adbart wrote:

(you should report this guy to Google and they'll check it out.)

YOUR JOKING RIGHT?


regards
thecat

[ADAM Web Design]

No, he's quite serious. Google isn't the best for nailing spammers though, because they usually go unreported. The ones that do get reported, while small in percentage, are large enough to force Google to really take its time to get to them all.