Cloaking Google Manual Reviewers?

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goddfadda

goddfadda

Pasta Eatin Mofo
Dec 1, 2007
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I've used several methods to cloak Google search + Adwords successfully, however I can't get under the manual review without a full-on IP delivery.

Just curious if there is anyone here successfully cloaking the manual reviews? I'm assuming they have a ton of IP addresses outside of Mountain View but most likely somewhere in the USA. I know they sometimes come in with a referer query like "site:yoursite.com" but not always.

I have no problem creating sites with lots of content, but let's face it... Google doesn't like a lot of rebill offers. I've had sites with substantial content slapped, and I'm assuming it was Google reviewers not liking my offer.

So the plan was to cloak just the offer to a real product and the users to my shitty rebill offer. I'd use the same landing page/domain/etc.
 


Yeah, cloaking Google is not really the best idea... you'll get fucked big time sooner or later.
 
Yea it's easy, don't rely on IP based cloaking, instead use hostname based cloaking. Google will always come at you from various IP's but they will never come from a S010600179a9c1177.gv.shawcable.net or some other ISP.

So, in htaccess use:

Code: 
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST}
and then:

Code: 
insightbb.com
comcast.net
qwest.net
rr.com
shawcable.net
level3.net
mindspring.com
earthlink.net
aol.com
cox.net
swbell.net
verizon.net
megabroadband.net
sbcglobal.net
qwest.net
spcsdns.net
optonline.net
comcastbusiness.net
rcn.com
ptd.net
astound.net
surewest.net
buckeyecom.net
zoominternet.net
verizon.net
charter.com
midco.net
knology.net
metrocast.net
bresnan.net
atlanticbb.net
wavecable.com
suddenlink.net
cia.com
grandenetworks.net
everestkc.net
cablespeed.com
cableone.net
cavtel.net
cebridge.net
sbcglobal.net
gci.net
speakeasy.net
sonic.net
pacbell.net
infoave.net
qwest.net
fuse.net
swbell.net
tds.net
ameritech.net
bellsouth.net
centurytel.net
dls.net
frontiernet.net
covad.net
dslextreme.com
consolidated.net
hawaiiantel.net
nuvox.net
snet.net
dejazzd.com
direcpc.com
clearwire-dns.net
epix.net
acsalaska.net
myvzw.com
mycingular.net
tmodns.net
wildblue.net
att.net
mchsi.com
bbtec.net
mnsi.net
isnbroadband.net
uu.net
dial-sprint.com
webtv.net
huntel.net
coxfiber.net
windstream.net
zoominternet.net
cox-sd.net
wideopenwest.com
citynet.net
sbcox.net
untd.com
xo.net
starband.net
That covers about 85% of US based ISP's and I'm sure you could find a few more if you looked through your webserver logs.

Make sure you use a VPS for this though, doing that many dns requests can put a big strain on shared hosting and if you use something like hostgator they'll shut you down pretty quick.

*edit*

On the level3.net hostname, you'll want to make it so it it only redirects if it has *dial*.level3.net
 
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Reactions: ImagesAndWords and goddfadda
I cloak a few campaigns based on faking the display URL, and I haven't been caught by a manual review in over a year. If you get caught for the URL issue (I'm not purporting to be another company, just direct linking but showing Google my site, not on the keyword URL level), you won't get banned, since they figure you just changed your page and the URL is now invalid. After a few manual reviewers caused my ads to go down a while back, it gave me enough information (the last IP before the campaign stopped) to cloak them.

For manual reviewers, there are a bit of them outside the US, so cloaking all non-US traffic (if it's a US-only offer) is a good bet.
 
A few months ago when I was doing Acai I made two landers. One miracle blog for my users and another lander that was a copied clickbank ebook diet lander just for the manual reviewers. Both landers were on my same domain.

Pointed all ads to my ebook lander (no rebill = ok right?) and pointed all keywords to my miracle blog. Slapped within a few days :(

I thought I would be ahead of the game since my display URL was still accurate but I'm dumbfounded as to why that went down. To this day I still see fake blogs with fake Display URLs to high authority domains and they appear to run for weeks at a time or more.
 
Or you could always promote physical products (non rebill), and not worry about being slap-chopped all the time!

Yes my fellow man, I want you to feel what it is like not to be spanked by google every fucking time.
 
goddfadda said:
Pointed all ads to my ebook lander (no rebill = ok right?) and pointed all keywords to my miracle blog. Slapped within a few days :(

I thought I would be ahead of the game since my display URL was still accurate but I'm dumbfounded as to why that went down. To this day I still see fake blogs with fake Display URLs to high authority domains and they appear to run for weeks at a time or more.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure Google still looks at the keyword URLs, though I can't be 100% sure. As for the fake display URL case (especially the Health.(Brand).com ads you still see), those guys are on thin ice. I know that when AdSense publishers started complaining, one brand whose URL was being used was contacted by an AdSense publisher, and the publisher reported that the brand was looking into filing legal action against the advertiser responsible.
 
Sticks79 said:
Or you could always promote physical products (non rebill), and not worry about being slap-chopped all the time!

Yes my fellow man, I want you to feel what it is like not to be spanked by google every fucking time.
Click to expand...

@sticks
Haha I hear ya. I knew this post was coming sooner or later! I would love to promote real products but I'm pulling some nice figures with the rebills and its gonna be painful to re-learn how to get something to work again. I'm sure the strategy is a bit different with real products.

@Johu
I didn't have the balls to do that display url cloaking to a major company name. Just didn't seem wise to me, but did amaze me how often it appeared to work while I can't even get my own domain to cloak without getting bitch slapped.
 
ayzo said:
Yea it's easy, don't rely on IP based cloaking, instead use hostname based cloaking. Google will always come at you from various IP's but they will never come from a S010600179a9c1177.gv.shawcable.net or some other ISP.
Click to expand...

+rep. Excellent information.

I guess you lose revenue from people who are goofing off at work and clicking the ads.
 
I wrote a quickie PHP script to check a list of IP addresses. Note this is not intended for real-time host lookups (use apache for that). This is intended to be run on your server / prosper / tracking IP address logs.

You can quickly identify funky hostnames and blacklist them, dickroll them, etc.

The php function gethostbyaddr() is a bit slow and can be swapped out with a full UDP lookup with a timeout capability. If the script runs slow in general, your DNS server sucks and you shouldn't run the Apache lookup until you get a better DNS server.

PHP: 
<?php
// Resolve each IP
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
  $ips = $_POST['ips']; 
	$ips = trim($ips); 
	$ips = explode("\r",$ips);
	$ips = str_replace("\n",'',$ips);
	
	foreach($ips as $ip ) {
		$final_ip .= $ip."<br />";
		$final_host .= gethostbyaddr($ip)."<br />";
	}
}
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Resolve a List of IPs to their Hosts</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post">
<p>Enter your IP list here separated by a new line</p>
<textarea name="ips" style="width:500px;height:200px"><?php print str_replace("<br />", "\n", $final_ip) ?></textarea>
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Check Em" />
</form>

<?php if(!empty($final_ip)) print "<hr />"; ?>
<div style="float:left; width:110px">
<?php print $final_ip ?>
</div>

<div style="float:left; width:600px">
<?php print $final_host ?>
</div>

</body>
</html>

edit: oh yea and I'm not responsible for any phone calls from your ISP asking why you reformatted their DNS server :)
 
webtrend said:
+rep. Excellent information.

I guess you lose revenue from people who are goofing off at work and clicking the ads.
Click to expand...

Yea that is the downside, but if you know what you're doing being able to cloak the offer may be worth it.

ImagesAndWords said:
@ayzo; Awesome stuff. +rep

Perhaps a stupid question here but; Would having the extra dns lookup potentially affect page load time? I imagine not too much but wanted to ask. :)
Click to expand...

On shared hosting definatley, when I first started doing this I was on hostgator and the load times were approaching 4 - 5 seconds and then they booted me about an hour later. With my vps and dedicated servers the load time never exceeds 2 seconds (from click to 100% loaded in browser) but if you have a lot of traffic coming in then you'll want to split it up with a few VPS's.
 
I was cloaking a few months back and got my entire MCC banned. I had to create a new corp and get a business CC bc i could not get any card with just my name on it to go through. So do not underestimate google.
 
Caspah said:
I was cloaking a few months back and got my entire MCC banned. I had to create a new corp and get a business CC bc i could not get any card with just my name on it to go through. So do not underestimate google.
Click to expand...

How were you cloaking. IP based? There is very good chance that you will get caught.

I like ayzo's method though. It is worth trying.
 
Luckily you can get Corporate cards for people that don't exist if you use AMEX :D and you don't have to put the corp info.
 
They use comcastbusiness.net and many other residential / business ISPs so I would advice to don't relay on it.

Good luck.
 
Last edited:
celsiux said:
They use comcastbusiness.net and many other residential / business ISPs so I would advice to don't relay on it.

Good luck.
Click to expand...
If you're seeing anything in the comcastbusiness.net ip range, I'd go out on a limb and say that that's not a standard review..
Every manual review I've detected so far is either level3, google, or doesn't reverse dns at all. Maybe one or two other sketchy ones, but definitely nothing in comcast's netspace.
 
xmcp123 said:
If you're seeing anything in the comcastbusiness.net ip range, I'd go out on a limb and say that that's not a standard review..
Every manual review I've detected so far is either level3, google, or doesn't reverse dns at all. Maybe one or two other sketchy ones, but definitely nothing in comcast's netspace.
Click to expand...

Exactly what I've found too but I haven't been testing for very long.
 
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