Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Aplus.net cloaking and PR leeching from unknowing customers!

[UmBillyCord]

Not sure what happened to this thread, but I would love to hear about this. We have noticed some fishy things too.

[Dan Grossman]

It got cut off during the downtime, here's the post:

Just wanted to drop a note about Aplus.net and their general sleeziness. First, they telemarket to people through the WHOIS database. I am not one of them, but there's threads on several forums about it.

The thing that really got me though was when I found out that they are leeching PR off their customers by inserting code on customers' pages whenever Googlebot stops by, without their customers knowledge or consent. The following exists in the cached copies of every customer I checked:

<center style="visibility:hidden">
<a href="http://www.aplus.net">Web Hosting</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;
<a href="http://servers.aplus.net">Dedicated Servers</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;
<a href="http://domains.aplus.net">Domain Names</a> by Aplus.net
</center>

Obviously, this is a hidden layer containing links to Aplus, boosting their PR and reducing the PR of all their customers, affecting their search result ranks and boosting Aplus.net's. Also, as some of you SEO people know, cloaking (showing a different page to search spiders than to real people) can get your site blacklisted and removed from major search engines. They're potentially doing thousands of dollars of harm to customers.

I visited aplus.net to check their hosting agreement today, and it mentions nothing about modifying pages under any circumstances. Live chat popped itself up and had no answers of course.

Sleezy, sleezy, sleezy, leeching off customers' hard work and messing with their sites and search positions.

P.S. Asked for proof: Do a backlink search for aplus.net at Google ("link:aplus.net" in search) and you'll see all their customers' sites (that already isn't normal). Click on the cached link under one of their sites to see the site as Google saw it at the crawl, and view source. You'll find the links to aplus.net despite them not existing in the live pages. Aplus.net is inserting them only when Google visits, which leeches PR and hurts these customers' search ranks!

[HostMidwest]

markm: Thank you for choosing Aplus! I'll bet you have questions on our web hosting plans. Please join me for a secure and private chat.

Visitor70095: Hmmm... I was interested in one of your linux plans.

markm: ok

Visitor70095: But I have a question...

markm: which one ?

markm: okm

Visitor70095: I noticed that you guys have a lot of unrelated sites linking to you when I did a search...

Visitor70095: Are you guys putting invisible links to aplus.net in customers' sites?

markm: This discussion might be easier via telephone. If you enter your phone number on this private line I'll call right away.


Obviously, it seems like they have something to hide... they can only discuss this via phone... Either that, or they're getting sick and tired of competitors asking annoying questions.

[UmBillyCord]

Wow. link:aplus.net tells it all.

17,300 linking to aplus.net.

Look at other host. -
2,070 linking to interland.com
1,040 linking to cihost.com

I would be pissed if I were a customer!

[HostMidwest]

The flip side of this is that Aplus.net just shot themselves in the foot. Now it's going to be easy for their (less scrupulous) competitors to contact their customers.

[pang]

I am sure lots of people will leave aplus once they know it.

[(Stephen)]

Someone needs to inform all 17k of these places of aplus's unethical works, but would that be spam and unethical itself?

[ldcdc]

What should be done is to report them to Google and every other major search engine.

[Project X]

how does anyone know that they insert this into websites when google visits?

does anyone here have a google schedule?

[Primal Blue]

Originally posted by LaurenStephens
how does anyone know that they insert this into websites when google visits?

does anyone here have a google schedule?

Simple. Look at the USER_AGENT if its a robot add the lines if its a Human user leave them off.

[Kimmikat]

That is bad... One of my early sites is still there...it dates back to 1999. It's moving now!

[Jasber]

The best way to handle this is contact the search engines. That is a better idea IMO than contacting thousands of website owners.

If someone has already done this let me know, if not I can write up an e-mail to various search engines.

Good find btw Dan.

[Dan Grossman]

Actually it came up at SitePoint's forums where someone wondered why their Google description contained aplus.net text. The aplus.net text appeared nowhere on his site, but it was in his cache.

I'm not sure if contacting search engines would be good for the individuals, depends on what they decide to do. It's basically a Google problem, and they could either remove aplus.net's listings so they don't benefit from the links, or realize that all these people are cloaking (their fault or not) and apply a filter to aplus.net's IPs removing thousands of customers from search results, or most likely, do nothing about it as Google's policy usually is.

[Jasber]

I would certainly hope Google doesn't ban all of their sites, but your right that could happen. I don't think that would be fair to them.

So now I don't really know what to do.

[Dan Grossman]

Google still has more than 50% market share of all search traffic. What they're doing is a big deal.