Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Screaming Frog tool left me stumped
-
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
-
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
-
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?
-
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
-
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Google only show high rankings to webmasters?
Hello! I'm using Google Chrome browser. On the browser logged in with the Google Web Master account, the keyword ranking of my site is ranked on pages 1 to 2. However, in the case of the Google Secret tab and other browsers that have not logged in to the Google Web Master account, the keyword ranking of my site is only 10 pages. Which one is more reliable?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1kB_man_YWH
Does it only show higher rankings to webmasters?
Or will you soon be able to see the high ranking that has only been seen by webmasters in other browsers? I desperately need your help. Thank you. I look forward to your kind cooperation.0 -
Best practices for retiring 100s of blog posts?
Hi. I wanted to get best practices for retiring an enterprise blog with hundreds of old posts with subject matter that won't be repurposed. What would be the best course of action to retire and maintain the value of any SEO authority from those old blog pages? Is it enough to move those old posts into an archive subdirectory and Google would deprioritize those posts over time? Or would a mass redirect of old blog posts to the new blog's home page be allowed (even though the old blog post content isn't being specifically replaced)? Or would Google basically say that if there aren't 1:1 replacement URLs, that would be seen as soft-404s and treated like a 404?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David_Fisher0 -
How to fix site breadcrumbs on mobile google search
For past one month, I have been doing some research on how to fix this issue on my website but all my efforts didn't work out I really need help on this issue because I'm worried about this I was hoping that Google will cache or understand the structure of my site and correct the error the breadcrumb is working correctly on desktop but not shown on mobile. For Example take a look at : https://www.xclusivepop.com/omah-lay-bad-influence/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ericrodrigo0 -
What is the proper URL length? in seo
i learned that having 50 to 60 words in a url is ok and having less words is preferable by google. but i would like to know that as i am gonna include keywords in the urls and i am afraid it will increase the length. is it gonna slighlty gonna hurt me? my competitors have 8 characters domain url and keywords length of 13 and my site has 15 character domain url and keywords length of 13 which one will be prefered by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Malicious backlinks
Hello to everyone! We have identified some weird links that are pointing to our site and we are not sure if they are considered malicious backlinks and we should disavow them. Most of them are directories of websites, the most common one is called "Top million domains by alexa" (you can see an example here: www.besafe.in/domain-list-237). Have you ever seen these kind of links before? Are they causing harm to our site? Thank you so much!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xaviplabor0 -
Pinging Links
Interested to know if anybody still uses the strategy of pinging links to make sure they get indexed, there are a number of sites out there which offer it. Is it considered dangerous/spamy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoman100 -
Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
Hi Mozzers, I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed. They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking. Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)? Thanks, Cole
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Sky Lancers: What is the deal?
For a few days now we are being stalked by a "referrer" site out of Bangladesh, called sky lancers dot net. Their home page is nothing but a login and password. All traffic comes from one invisible inner page. They don't seem to try to login, nor do they use PPC to get to the site. They send thousands of visitors a day. Anyone has any idea what this site is trying to achieve and what their goal may be? All they do is get the bounce rate to skyrocket, the time on the site to go down and the avg page views of course to go down as well, as they click out immediately after they hit the homepage. Any suggestions on what to do about this practice? And what are they trying to achieve? Thanks for your insights guys!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Discountvc0