Apr 26, 2004 : Aplus.net Takes Down Cloaked Links

📅 April 26, 2004 - Web hosting provider Aplus.net admitted last Friday that it "cloaked" customer's Web sites with hidden code in order to boost its search engine rankings, but said that it had removed the links as soon as it became aware of them.

Aplus.net said a subcontractor it hired to help boost its Google search ranking was to blame for installing the hidden links. According to Aplus.net, less than one percent of its Web hosting customers were affected by the hidden links.
"We didn't apply enough control over what our subcontractor was doing," said Ivan Vachovsky, CEO of Aplus.Net. "We have changed our procedures so that it never happens again. I would like to thank the online community, which helped us locate and eliminate the problem promptly."
The San Diego-based company said it had already removed all the hidden links from its customer's Web sites, which, according to Google, resulted in 17,300 Web pages being linked to the Aplus.net Web site. The Google algorithm is known to value external links to a Web site as a strong indicator of overall popularity, and favors this factor in determining page rank.
TheWHIR reported last Thursday that users of the Webhosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com) forum had accused Aplus.net of using its customer's Web sites to promote its ranking within search engine algorithms, without their knowledge.
"Cloaking" is a technique that involves displaying optimized Web pages to search engine spiders and unmodified pages to real users. The optimized pages cloaked by Aplus.net included keywords that did not even appear on the customer's Web site and links to Aplus.net Web pages.
Aplus.net said that while the hidden links have been removed, cached copies may still contain the links until the next Google search engine crawl.
Hosting customers have expressed concerns that the cloaking could have jeopardized the search engine listings of the sites altered, as search engine companies typically penalize tactics such as cloaking.