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Black Hat that still works after 2024 March Update with evidence
I came across this tactic because the company I work for is ranking in the similar set as some of their keywords. Google is pretty good at detecting online gambling sites, so these sites cannot do SEO organically.
They way they do it is, after March 2024 Update, they purchased expired domains (in the tune of 200+ domains) and they set up a headers detection to detect if the requests come from Googlebots, they would show Google the content (which scraped from top results in the keywords they're ranking); however, if the request header is not of Googlebot, they would redirect you to their betting sites.
One of their sites went from 0 traffic in February 2024 to almost 1 million daily traffic today (from SEMRush). They're ranking highly on some of the most competitive keywords in the country as well. I'm so surprised Google cannot detect this basic spam. I wanna get this out there so that either Google fixes it or they'll lose marketshare faster, either way, I don't mind. Some queries are now a bunch of these garbage online gambling site.
I imagine if this continues, for some people,
Evidence:
lattonpark (dot) com
cassiopeiax (dot) com
disposablewisdom (dot) com
psikodramatist (dot) com
At the peak, the last one went to almost 3m traffic daily. They targeted high volume keywords like (translated to).
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1 Reply
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You can see the content they’re showing to Google by running a curl command with Googlebot headers. You will see that it’s not even a long content but just a few sentences of top SERP title mixed together that they copied from the sites that ranked well.
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Wow. This is interesting info. Thanks for sharing.
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Interesting post, thanks. I’ve noticed this in other SERPs too, it’s really random but I might start saving them to update this later.
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Gambling and p0rn always leading the way when it comes to Spam.
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Wow. What a hack. This is good technique. Redirect request from google to normal content and request from non-googlebot to the orginal gambling site. I love this idea. Simply denying the entry of Gbot can make this much impact then what way one can exploit it.
Yes, it will be a very good idea for affiliate sites.
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Sorry my friend you don’t belong here you actually know how it works!
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Are they doing cloaking?
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So the expired domains are ranking in Google? I am unclear where the traffic is actually coming from
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dang, online gambling is really is international scare nowadyas. and they’re getting better and better at cloaking Googlebot.
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Jobiak does a version of this for Google Jobs. They spin up goofy nonsensical domains and only redirect traffic when utm parameters are present.
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this, along with 100s of other versions of this, has been going on for decades.
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Online casinos definitely can do organic SEO. There’s a whole field of stock market -level affiliates doing it.
This I guess is an unregulated casino?
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They must still be getting a bunch of high quality backlinks to those expired domains, correct? How are they going about this? I don’t see how garbage content and just high impact headers can get those expired domains to rank so highly for such competition keywords other than by getting high quality backlinks.
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The problem with things like this working for a minute is that they never last and it’s nothing you want to attach to a website you plan to keep for the long haul.
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I understood the cloaking part but can u tell me how are they able to rank so quickly with such scraped content, or were these domains already ranking first, before they started using it
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