Eric Bramlett, a local seo expert, discoverd that Trulia, a popular real estate search site, has been cloaking their partner pages. This is clearly against Google’s TOS and there is a good chance they will get penalized by Google. Well after eading his post, I did a little more snooping my self and found they were cloaking the of the following pages as well:
- http://www.americantowns.com/ct/fairfield-real-estate
- http://www.kiplinger.com/money/realestate/
- http://www.silvar.org/
Update: Trulia has taken down their cloaks. It’s amazing what a little peer pressure will do.
This is abhorrent. One level below redirecting PageRank. I have zero respect for Trulia now. They need real SEOs that know how to dominate SERP without resorting to the lowest and most OBVIOUS of black hat tricks. I openly told Trulia back during the Voices fiasco to hire real SEOs. I hope they figure it out now. They have some shady people that can’t even keep pace with the latest in black hat tricks that won’t be so darned obvious.
Mary, they were actually redirecting PageRank through this cloaked 301 – it was their whole motivation for cloaking the redirect.
Trulia has now pulled down the UA cloaks on all the pages we’ve identified.
an address to this story was provided by Christian Dillstrom, the mobile & social media marketing god, so you must be doing an amazing job.