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Screaming Frog tool left me stumped
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Hi there again,
I found a major cloaking hack in our client's website that is really well camouflaged and all the seo tools that I tried to help me check for cloaking couldn't find it.
I know that screaming frog is a great tool and I want to use it to help me, however, I can't seem to get my way around their system that I downloaded.
Can you help me with the screaming frog program? Do you know where I can make a full site check for cloaking, maybe there are more links that I wasn't notified about?
I would really appreciate if you could help me with that.
Thanks so much, Ruchy
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Hi Ruchy,
That's fantastic deep crawl is a great tool.
I was talking about two different types of cloaking one using an URL with a C name for hidden cloaking e.g. https://www.rebrandly.com/
Thank you for the kind words. Giving good answers and thumbs up or thumbs down definitely does make a difference I have outlined a lot of it below the official MozPoints URLhttp://moz.com/community/mozpoints
Yes marking anything as a giving thumbs-up is telling somebody they have helped you and in the event of thumbs up is their response was valuable and maybe contributed to answering your question.
In the case, of giving good answer person has answered your question giving as well as thumbs-up is the way anything is a way of saying thank you.
Welcome to the most community, and I look forward to seeing you here.
All the best,
Tom
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Hi Tom
we finally solved the issue. Thanks for your clear answers, the info really helped me. We bought DeepCrawl and it really was helpful.
What was the C name you were talking about?
Thank you, Ruchy
P.S. i marked good answer by the wrong one, does it make a difference?
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Hey just wanted to check was any answer helpfull to you?
Is there anything we might've missed or failed to help you solve the issue?
All the best,
Tom
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Thanx Andy
That was a helpful piece of information.
I am still a little confused, can you give me some further advice?
I there any way for me to do a full site cloaking check?
Ruchy
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Hi Ruchy,
Screaming Frog is an excellent tool. Dan is a great guy to update and the on that.
In my opinion, I have been able to find formation using https://www.deepcrawl.com/
The cost is higher deepcrawl is also a hosted platform.
Still, it can do remarkable things that no other tool that I know of can do.
There are built just for checking cloaking this one is free
http://www.seotools.com/seo-cloaking-checker/
If you have access to the DNS will want to examine this thoroughly.
I have laid out how you would find c name DNS records if you do not have access to the DNS as well.
One other method you might have to use to determine whether or not domain or subdomain has been cloaked as shown here: http://www.ghosturl.com/ if the cloaking happens in a manner described in the URL for this sentence.
So the scenario would be the cloaked URL would be something like
http://www.cloaked.example.com/?=ku2b4B30ijbasT47720sb534Nbq6
( please know I used example.com is the domain because I did not want to pointed that any live site not because of anything to do with cloaking)
Therefore they're using most likely a C name inside the DNS to pointed to http://www.example.com
You will need to use a tool that would be able to look at the IP or C name being created by the DNS.
The free tool I know if that can look for a C name or A record that should not be there is https://www. cloudflare.com the way you would do this is run the site through the DNS wizard that pulls the current DNS including all the records (it can miss some, but it does an excellent job of catching most of all DNS records. (9 times out of 10 will get all of them)
Because most tools make it impossible to see the C name when looking at DNS, it is important to remember there is a free service that is not designed for this purpose but can be used to discover the rogue cloaked URL.
https://www.cloudflare.com/a/sign-up (the free-tier offers the same ability to get DNS information)
http://i.imgur.com/Wm7W0aM.mp4
https://cl.ly/0A3k3d2j401n/Screen Recording 2017-01-26 at 07.09 AM.mov
http://i.imgur.com/lIN9Gsm.png
Hope This helps,
Tom
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Dan from Screaming Frog has just had a look at this, and although he is on the move at the moment, he said this...
On the road to a meeting, but they can switch user-agent & change to JavaScript rendering mode to test for cloaking. Depends how it's cloaked, though. Some may do via referrer which you can't test for within the Spider (yet!). Will reply a bit later
-Andy
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Hi there
You can spider the site with screaming frog and then do a bulk export of all the outlinks into a CSV and run through and see if there are links in there that shouldn't be
Have you downloaded the latest version?
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