Bramblog

$1 for 5 minute block to check browser compatibility.  Check it out!  www.crossbrowsertesting.com

It hasn’t propagated my datacenter yet, but Eric Blackwell shot me an IM and gave me some updates on some of our newer sites.

Here’s what Matt Cutts had to say:

I just commented on a blog about the subject, but didn’t have the complete data.  I ran it, and was surprised to see that people are searching for roost as much as trulia.  ***edit*** roost is an actual word…that’s why it’s searched

This news is a couple of days old, but it’s very pertinent.  I spent about an hour last night cross referencing what the Adwords Keyword Selector reported vs. what I have personally seen in traffic from ranking sites.  The data looks strong to quite strong.

I’m really loving this…Overture was okay and free, and then went down.  Wordtracker is okay and costs, but for the last year was really our only option.  The new Google data looks like it’s way better than either of those options, and free.

Alright, I’m relatively new to woot, so forgive me if this has been done before.  This item is awesome.  I only wish that I’d had a chance to buy it before it was sold out.

Title pretty much sums it up.  I checked http://seattleweekly.trulia.com/WA/Seattle/ for the user agent cloak, and it’s no longer there.  I checked for an IP cloak using the Google translator, and didn’t see one.  If they are using a good IP cloak, we wouldn’t be able to see it on the translator.  There is a possibility that they still have an IP cloak up, but it would take some time & resources to check for it.  If I get bored, I might do so.

So…first page on sphinn looks like it will drive ~200 visitors, based on the Trulia Cloaking piece.

Be patient with this flash video. It’s big b/c I wanted everyone to be able to read the text on the screen. This is pretty cut/dry - we found a couple of cloaked redirects on Trulia’s site. It looks like they’re doing it simply to pump the PR of specific pages, and to get some good sitewide one-way links.

Sorry for the slow load & lack of narrative on the last one. The video can still be found here (but be patient with it.) Here’s a pictorial of what’s going on:

#1 - Go to www.seattleweekly.com

#2 - Click on Classifieds > Real Estate For Sale

#3 - It takes you to Trulia’s Seattle Weekly Partner Page http://seattleweekly.trulia.com/WA/Seattle

#4 - Using the user agent switcher for FF, change your user agent to Googlebot

#5 - Refresh the page. It now reloads as the page Trulia optimizes for (currently #3 for “Seattle Real Estate) www.trulia.com/WA/Seattle

What are the implications of this? Basically that Trulia isn’t playing it as clean as their PR guys would tell you. They’re intentionally screwing their partners (they’re doing this to Parade, as well) out of links back, and they’re picking up some nice one-way sitewides as a result. The results they’re getting probably aren’t worth the risk of a cloaked 301, but they’re sure doing it. Oh…they’re also doing a pretty stupid, easily detectable cloak.

First they throw up the “technical difficulties” page, and now they’re showing a 404.  With how much money/minute those guys make, somebody’s getting fired!