Recropical Link Cloaking – What you Need to Know

We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.




If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.



Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.



Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:



Hello,



As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.



If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.



Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.



Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.

Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.



Have a good week



Visiting the site in question you’ll notice a few things:



Decent number of Backlinks

Minimal Outgoing Links

Decent Pagerank (3 – 5)

Quite possibly the perfect link exchange? Unfortunately not. Look a bit closer.



The Detail

If you look at the email the URL should have a referral string on it (Something like ?ref= or ?pg=). This either sets a cookie when you click on it or logs your IP (or both) which makes your site “appear in the sidebar”.



Thus very cleverly making you think that the website offering the link exchange does indeed link to you.



There’s a few things you can do here to check:



1.Run the referral link through a HTTP Header Checker to see if it sets a Cookie

2.Look at your Yahoo inbound links, does the site in question appear? (it may be too soon but worth looking)

3.Look at the site through a proxy & remove the ?pg or ?ref from the end of the string (Incase they use IP Tracking & not cookies)

4.Clear your cookies & try the site again without the referral path on the end

Very Sneaky

This unfortunately is a very cunning & sneaky tactic to harvest thousands upon thousands of Recropical links. I would imagine that the strike rate doing this is much much higher than just blasting out link requests to everyone in sight.



Be Careful

If you’re contracting an SEO company & they’re using this tactic I’d be very very careful. I’ve seen a number of players that have been branded as unethical by their whole online community for using such tactics