Searching for News and Coming up with the Same Lame Website ~ Cloaking and Page-Jacking ~ It's Illegal you know?

They call me Groovy Granny, I go by many names, my real life story will be featured right here ...

Cloaking and Page-Jacking

"Page-jacking" is the new artform whereby unscrupulous webmasters copy popular sites such as Microsoft and the Harvard Business Review to their own servers and use a cloaking system to deliver those stolen pages to search engines.

Once the search engine spiders find the pages, they are indexed, and unwitting surfers looking for, say, Microsoft, would click on what they thought were going to the Microsoft site and would be instead page-jacked to an unrelated site which used this method.

Last year, the FTC "cracked down" on pagejacking, bringing the technique to the attention of the general public. "Cloaking" or "IP Delivery" is a technique which allows you to deliver different pages for the same URL based upon the IP address of the requesting agent.

When the server receives a page request, a script checks the IP address of the user agent (or browser) using a database of known search engine IP addresses. If a match is found, the server delivers an optimized, "search engine friendly" page for the spider to index. This page is optimized for each search engine, according to each search engine's algorithm. These pages are invisible to the regular user.

If no match is found, the requesting user agent is sent to the page the public sees.

In other words, cloaking shows an optimized doorway pages to the search engines while displaying different and beautiful pages to human visitors.

Aside from the obvious advantage of being able to feed the search engines pages which are specifically designed for high placement, IP delivery also hides the meta tags from anyone who might want to steal them to boost their own placement.

While IP delivery is clearly appropriate and ethical when used, say, to optimize a page which is only a flash page or just a graphic, the potential for abuse is there.

Anyone can learn to write their own cloaking script at sites like the one at http://www.spiderhunter.com/. The cost of commercial cloaking software ranges from $25 to more than $1,000.

An interesting situation arose last month, when a search engine optimization firm filed a complaint with the FTC about another SEO firm allegedly pagejacking using cloaking. The two principals made appearances at SearchEngineDiscussion.com, each airing his own side of the case.

Is cloaking ethical? When used appropriately, yes. The problem is that since everything is hidden, webmasters and search engine optimizers who use this technique are on their honor.

Will the search engines penalize you for using it? Not yet. But it's probably going to happen. Given that the main objective of search engine alogrithms are to prevent manipulation which renders relevancy irrelevant, as it were, surely this is yet another trick that isn't going to be around for long. I certainly wouldn't counsel anyone to spend money on cloaking at this point.

http://www.searchenginecommando.com/articles/titles/2.html

What is Pagejacking?

What is Pagejacking?

Pagejacking is a technique used to siphon Internet traffic from intended websites to unintended sites, usually containing bogus content. Once at the site, surfers might find it difficult to leave, as clicking the “back” button of the browser might only redirect them to another related site (owned by the same company).

Pagejacking is unlawful, under the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), falling under the purview of a deceptive practice that interferes with commerce.

To set up pagejacking, an unscrupulous vendor copies a popular webpage from a legitimate site along with its underlying HTML code. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and is what Web browsers process into the visual graphics we see when we visit sites. You can view the source code, or HTML of a webpage by right-clicking on a site and choosing “View Page Source” from the popup menu.

The source code of a webpage includes meta tag. Meta tag are keywords and key phrases that describe page content. Search engines use the meta tag section to classify and rate the page. High-rated webpages are presented first by search engines, making it easier for surfers to find good information fast.

Pagejackers steal the coding of a highly rated webpage to trick search engines into listing the copied page. The pagejacker then adds a small bit of code to the copied page, causing it to redirect surfers to a completely different website. For example, a surfer might enter “party supplies” in a search engine, and of the many returned links, the copied site will be one of them. Clicking on this seemingly legitimate link will reroute the surfer to the offending site.

Once pagejacked, it’s often difficult to leave the pornographic site. Clicking the “back,” “forward” or even “close” buttons might redirect the surfer to even more objectionable sites with windows popping open like fireworks. This is referred to as mousetrapping, commonly accomplished using JavaScript or other coding. Disabling JavaScript can prevent it in most cases, but JavaScript is also used to enhance legitimate websites, so many people prefer it enabled.

Traffic is the basis for revenue on the Internet and pagejacking increases traffic to websites through illegitimate means. With every click to leave, a redirect to another offending site boosts that site’s traffic statistics and earns the pagejacker a small revenue for funneling traffic. Pagejacking is also used to increase advertising revenue and can be utilized to boost the selling price of a domain by presenting bloated traffic statistics to the buyer.

If you find yourself pagejacked, manually enter a legitimate address in the URL (address) field of the browser, or click on a bookmark. Check for lingering open windows that might be behind the main window, or minimized to the task bar. If concerned about minors, consider a filtering program that will block pornography, preventing a browser from redirecting to offending sites.

You can also report pagejacking to the FTC.

There’s a new type of terrorist stalking the World Wide Web ~ Online Outlaws Target Business Sites

December 15, 2010

Online Outlaws Target Business Sites

There’s a new type of terrorist stalking the World Wide Web.

“PageJackers” attack corporate web sites, stealing their pages so they can use them to lure web surfers away from their victims and toward their clients’ sites.

The scheme – or should I call it “scam” – uses a cloaking device (though one unrelated to “Star Trek”) to masquerade one company’s pages as another’s as they list out on Internet Search Engines.

It’s part of the ultra competitive “search engine strategy” many companies use to ensure they get top billing to the millions of surfers looking for their type of business.

If you have any kind of e-mail presence, you may have received oodles of pitches claiming they can get your site listed more prominently on Internet search engines, if the price is right. I get so many of these inbox assaults that I nearly wore down my “delete” key.

The concept is quite valid, however, and it makes sense for many businesses.

“Optimizing” your search engine placement supposedly ensures that, when someone types “widgets” (or whatever it is you do or sell) into a search engine, your web site is displayed before your competition’s.

This means the web surfing public is more likely to find your site and visit it, rather than click through endless pages of matches that may or may not have anything to do with your business, but which happen to contain a similar keyword.

Unfortunately, as with so many other things, it’s open to abuse.

The problem isn’t the cloaking technology itself. Cloaking, which is also called “IP Delivery” or “Spoon Feeding,” can be used to help get around web designs that otherwise wouldn’t get indexed properly by search engines – like some pages generated by databases.

So, as with many other technologies, methodologies – or car drivers – it’s the nut behind the wheel that causes the problem.

These less than scrupulous interlopers use cloaking to get their pirated web pages to show up when the Internet address (URL) of the original company is requested.

How? The search engine is fooled into thinking it’s showing the real page, but when the searching public clicks on the “Joe’s Billiard Hall” link they found in their search, they’re whisked instead to “Frank’s Pool Parlor,” which just happens to be a client of the virtual hijackers and pays them by the click through for the people delivered to Frank’s site.

What these modern day pirates are doing is stealing the other company’s intellectual property, and using it to present its clients’ web pages. It’s an online form of the old “wolf in sheep’s clothing” ploy.

Rather than doing their own work and getting their clients listed on the search engines legitimately, they just find top-ranked pages that contain most of the same keywords they want, file the serial numbers off them and copy them onto their own servers.

Then, when the robots from the search engines come a poking around, they see the stolen page, store its fake location, and send traffic there instead of to the real McCoy (or, in the case of my example, the real “Joe”).

The issue came to my attention after a data recovery company’s “search engine optimizer” searched for a listing of web sites linking to its client’s site. The ugly discovery that it had been had opened up the whole PageJacking can of worms, causing them to file a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission.

That supposedly led to some house cleaning and many “mea culpas” from the culprit company, which was apparently hijacking pages on a huge scale.

The last I heard, the culprit was no longer online and, needless to say, the legal ripples are still spreading.

How can a company fight the online plague of PageJacking? According to a spokesman for one of the firms hit by these modern day pirates, they’ve now been forced to hire two people whose fulltime job is to monitor the search engines and the company’s placement on them.

They made the costly move after going online one Monday and discovering that, as if by magic, their company’s listings – which they’d paid good money to have “optimized” – had disappeared into unknown reaches of cyberspace.

Which must have been a frightening prospect for a company that’s used to getting forty per cent of its customers via the Internet.

________
Search engine spam
Definition

Excessive manipulation to influence search engine rankings, often for pages which contain little or no relevant content.

Information

Search engine spamming often gets confused with legitimate search engine optimization (SEO). While there is much gray area between the two extremes, in their most clear cut forms the terms are very different. Spamming involves getting a site more exposure than it deserves for its keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search experiences. Optimization involves getting a site the exposure it deserves on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences.

Examples Include:

Irrelevancy - targeting keywords unrelated to the site/page.

Hidden Text - putting keywords where visitors will not see them, used to increase keyword count.

Hidden Links - putting links where visitors will not see them, used to increase link popularity.

Doorway Clutter - mass production of low-quality doorway pages, sometimes of the machine-generated variety.

The Internet Harbors Them …

The Internet Harbors Them …

The Mask of Sanity

Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?

What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?

The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people – whether they have a conscience or not – favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.

If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people’s hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]

Crazy and frightening – and real, in about 4 percent of the population….

The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] – a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality – and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered “alarmingly high,” is about 40 per 100,000 – one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy – murderers, serial killers, mass murderers – people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.

Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one’s boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.

Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.

Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.

The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron – or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer – is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.

What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)

read more @ http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm

Pagejacking - identifying and dealing with pagejackers ...

Pagejacking - identifying and dealing with pagejackers

What is pagejacking?

In essence, pagejacking is the copying of a page by unauthorized parties in order to filter off traffic to another site. The copying doesn't include just the wording - it's the whole box and dice. Traffic to the illegitimate page is then usually redirected to a competing, or at times, totally unrelated offer.

Why do people pagejack?

When you have the good fortune of having a page that ranks highly in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages); it brings you both good and bad attention. Some unscrupulous individuals make take copies of your pages in an attempt to get equally high, or higher rankings and therefore capturing some of the traffic that really should have gone to your site.

In the instance where the pagejacker is also well versed in search engine optimization; it can be the case that the *majority* of search engine traffic that usually arrives on your site is redirected to the pagejacker. As you can imagine, this can be very costly to your online business.

How is pagejacking executed?

The "newbie" pagejacker simply copies your page in it's entirety and pastes it into another page on his own site. They may add some of their own offers to the page and adjust the links in your content to point to other pages on their site. Only the most stupid of pagejackers use this process.

The more advanced pagejacking strategy is quite clever. First, a copy of your page is taken. A page is then created on the pagejackers site that is basically a carbon copy of your content - including meta-tags. The pagejacker then adds extra scripting to allow only search engine robots to be able to read the content of the page. A 302 .htaccess redirect or meta-refresh is then used to automatically redirect human viewers to a totally different page - they never see your content.

How do I detect pagejacking?

You can detect pagejacking quite easily as most pagejackers will only bother with pages that have decent search engine rankings. Use the following process:

Identify a couple of phrases that are rather uncommon in a popular page on your site.

Run these phrases through a query on the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. When querying the engines, ensure your encapsulate your query with quotes; e.g. "the flomble is pink with black stripes"

In the results that come back, as long as the phrase you have used is uncommon, you'll probably only see your page and instances of pagejacking. Even if you're not able to use an uncommon phrase as the basis of your search criteria, or you allow the reproduction of some of your content on other sites and you wind up with 100 results, go through all the results pages anyway. Yahoo, Google and MSN always show extended snippets from the page which will make it easier to identify a site that is using pagejacked content.

To confirm that the suspect listing is in fact pagejacked content, instead of clicking on the link to the page in the search engine results, click on the "cached" option. It will display the page as it appeared to the search engine robot the last time it was crawled. High ranking pages are usually crawled quite regularly, so the cached copy should be reasonably fresh.

How do I deal with pagejacking

Pagejackers by nature are a snivelling, cowardly breed and easy to deal with if you go about it in the right way.

If you have identified pagejacked content, the first thing you need to do is to save the cached copy of the page - this is very important as it is solid evidence.

One of the great features of Google is that when it displays cached copies of pages, it adds a box to the top of it with identifying information, including the URL and the date the cached copy was taken.

If you are using Internet Explorer, to save a copy of the cached page, simply go to "File", select "Save as" and in the "Save as type" dropdown option, choose "Web archive, single file (*.mht)".

This option will download everything, including images and the Google info box into a single file.

Having a single file makes it easier to transmit to other parties during the follow up process.

Once you have the archive file safely stored on your own computer, it's time to swing into action.

The first thing you should do is to contact the owner of the site. There is no need to be overly polite in the notification, but also do not be abusive.

Bear in mind that in some cases, the pagejacker may *not* be the actual site owner. The owner of the site may have employed an unethical optimization company who used the pagejacking technique. Regardless, it is the site owners' responsibility to deal with the situation.

I recommend writing a brief note along these lines: Subject = "Copyright infringement - (Domain Name)" Body =

"It has come to my attention that you have made an unauthorized use of my copyrighted work located here; (copyrighted work URL), by reproducing it on your site (their URL with infringing copy). At no time have I given permission for you to reproduce my original content in such a way.

A cached copy from Google of the illegally copied content on your site is attached, along with details as to its location on your site and the date it was gathered. It appears that my content is being used on your site as part of a pagejacking strategy and is visible only to search engines.

As the legal owner of this copyrighted content, I demand that you remove my property from your site immediately.

You have 72 hours to remove this content. If the content is not removed within this time frame, then I will find it necessary to take further action; including contacting Google, your hosting service and any other legal avenues I have at my disposal.

Sincerely - Your name - Your contact details

Ensure you flag the email as urgent and select the read receipt option in your email software. If after 72 hours, the content is not removed, you should first contact the company hosting the site.

These details, as well as the domain name registrant, can usually be found on the WHOIS record for the domain name by looking at the nameserver information, or by running a trace on the domain name.

If you do find it necessary to contact the hosting service, check the host's site first for guidelines for copyright complaints. Each company may differ slightly in terms of copyright infringement complaints processes and it's important that you follow their submission guidelines carefully - usually a US company will direct you to follow a process as laid out in the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

If the infringement has caused you a major loss in profit, then it is advisable that you contact your lawyer before taking any sort of action if it is within your means to do so.

How do I prevent pagejacking

In short - It gets to a point where you can spend so much time in trying to protect your online business from parasites and copycats that you may as well not bother with having a site at all. Monitoring is the key in relation to pagejacking.

Other possible negative effects of pagejacking

I've read a number of reports on the subject of pagejacking that appear to indicate that some search engines will favor the pagejacked page over the original one to the point that the original page will be dropped from the SERPs altogether. The reason for this is that most search engines employ duplicate content filters - and the way some work is that the higher ranking page is usually the one that is kept.

One very important negative effect of pagejacking is damage to your brand. For instance, a pagejacker may copy a page that contains multiple instances of your business or product name. If the pagejacker is successful in achieving consistently higher rankings than your own content, unsuspecting surfers may begin to associate the brand with misleading content and steer clear of it altogether.

Protecting your site from online parasites is an ongoing battle; I hope this article has assisted you in dealing with one aspect of this multi-faceted war.

Related learning resources

Preventing credit card fraud.

Pay per click fraud - ppc anti-fraud strategies and tools

Michael BlochTaming the Beast http://www.tamingthebeast.net/

Tutorials, web content, tools and software.Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources__________Copyright information....

This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety, including live links & this copyright statement must be included. Visit http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ for free Internet marketing and web development articles, tutorials and tools!

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Frankly speaking .. internet crime in the U.S. continues to climb ...

March 13, 2011

Frankly Speaking, Internet Crime is rising faster due to unemplyoment. Most notable are the religous charities that are popping up all over the country. The criminal mind finds it easy to exploit money from those down and out on their luck and believe their only hope lies with the church ... If you suspect a crime, it is easy to report.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/