Hi, kids!

A Google search for "wav files" (with or without quotation marks)has
brought up two pages from my Web site on the first page of returns for
years now (did today too, BTW).The other returns have been the same
sites for years as well (we have the advantage of having been around a
long time, and hundreds of sites have links to us). In any case, all
of the sites offer computer sound files in wav format.(Mine are just
funnier than the others)

Being a diligent little peckerwood, I run this search every month or
so just to stay current. A check this morning surprised me with a new
entry at the #4 spot (ahead of me, those cads!). I quickly clicked the
link to find out about the new "first page" kid. The mouseover listed
the address as www.hometurf.com/music1.html but I was bumped instead
to www.resumepages.com/

The resume site naturally has nothing to do with wav files, and a
source code check revealed no untoward META tags. The site reeks of
cheese, however, so I'm wondering whether this is just an HTML trick
to rope people in. Google has proven very effective at rooting these
sorts of sites out, so if trickery is involved, I'd guess it's
something new.

So, what's the poop, group?

Thank you for your time.

Hi, 

To help Google weed out these types of sneaky redirects you can visit
this page here for info

://www.google.com/intl/vi/webmasters/guidelines.html

and here for reporting. 

://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

It doesn't look like the page is cloaking at all, and as  dpa-ga below
suggests it is redirecting twice to get to where it is going. I would
guess that the page at some point did exist, but now is missing or has
been purchased.

thanks, 

webadept-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by calaboss-ga on 07 Jan 2003 12:16 PST

Thank you for the FAQ's. I don't know how I'd have found them without
your help. However, they do not answer my question. Let me be more
direct: Why has that URL passed Google's cheese test? No site using
re-direct has shown up on page one. No site at all has shown up in the
last six months. Why this bonehead URL?

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 07 Jan 2003 13:09 PST

Hi again, 

Well, to be quite frank it hasn't really. 

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=resumepages%2Ecom

See, their PageRank is NULL, not even 0, so obviously this has been
caught by Google and they are dropping the resumepages.com pages from
their indexes completely. This is obviously a straggler. Remember too
that the system is basically automated. Automation is never perfect
(and some schools of thought smile a little every time this is
confirmed).

The SEO marketing scheme that creates things like this is a) you make
a site that attracts lots of searches. You make it acceptable to
places like DMOZ and Yahoo, and get that site listed. You do more than
one and get the PageRank up.
b) you then redirect the page to a customer site who has paid to get
that traffic and convince them this is a good thing to do.

This use to actually work a few years back, but what it does now is
gets your site removed from the index.

Writing to Google using the links above will have a human eye take a
look at it and it will probably be gone in a week or so.

webadept-ga

That answer will do. I hit the Wayback machine and found that the URL
now resolves to http://65.71.179.169/music1.html It's called Michael's
Home Turf. The site did exist for years at another URL. How it got
picked up by Google at the old address and ranked on page one for a
wav files search is still beyond me.

The exact text that comes up for the "wav files" hit is:

Employment Resources - resume, writing, distribution, jobs, ... 
ResumePages.com, Take Control, Post Resume, Search Jobs, Contact Us,
Post
Job. salaries, books, EZCash. Recommended Links, Affordable Resume
Writing, ...
Description: A variety of music clips from different genres.
Category: Arts > Music > Sound Files > WAV
www.hometurf.com/music1.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages 

You'll notice that the "Category" for this page is "Category: Arts >
Music > Sound Files > WAV" which is my guess why the page is turning
up when "wav files" is searched.

The www.hometurf.com/music1.html page bounces to
www.resumepages.com/error_doc/not_found.html which bounced to
www.resumepages.com; a site of questionable reliabilty, considering
the stack of domain names they're selling at the bottom of the page.

Hi, dpa. You know, I kind of thought the same thing.