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?
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
-
Apparent Bot Queries and Impressions in Webmaster Tools
I've been noticing some strange stats in Google Webmaster Tools for my forum, which has been getting spam queries with impressions and no clicks. See the queries in the attached images. This might be a motive for the spammers or scrapers. I set the date range to just 22 Aug - 22 Nov and I see very obviously the spike is due to impressions. Questions: What should/can I do? Is Google doing something about this? How to avoid this? o6gKB
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SameerBhatia0 -
On the use of Disavow tool / Have I done it correctly, or what's wrong with my perception?
On a site I used GSA search engine ranker. Now, I got good links out of it. But, also got 4900 links from one domain. And, I thought according to ahrefs. One link from the one domain is equal to 4900 links from one domain. So, I downloaded links those 4900 and added 4899 links to disavow tool. To disavow, to keep my site stable at rankings and safe from any future penalty. Is that a correct way to try disavow tool? The site rankings are as it is.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMTrends0 -
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 -
Why There is No link Data Available in my Webmaster Tools even the site has lots of links and webmastert tools account setup properly
i have few account in my webmaster tools that are not showing any link data even the has lots of links. i checked the setup and its everything is good. is some one tell me why there is no data coming through? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners1 -
I Mistakenly uploaded Disavow File to Non WWW version of Webiste in Webmaster Tools...is this a Problem???
Hey guys and gals, I need some advice on this please. I recently had someone perform a negative S.E.O campaign on my site and I was inundated with 13,000 + spammy links pointing to my website and I had to perform a Disavow in Google Webmaster Tools but for some reason, it is showing that I uploaded the Disavow text file to the Non WWW version of the website but the WWW version of my website is the preferred domain and I have all NON WWW queries being 301 redirected to www.pcmedicsoncall.com My question is should I correct this and upload the Disavow text to the preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools??? Please advise on how I should proceed with this situation.... Thank you. Cam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CamMcArthur0 -
How do I know what links are bad enough for the Google disavow tool?
I am currently working for a client who's back link profile is questionable. The issue I am having is, does Google feel the same way about them as I do? We have no current warnings but have had one in the past for "unnatural inbound links". We removed the links that we felt were being referred to and have not received any further warnings, nor have we noticed any significant drop in traffic or rankings at any point. My concern is that if I work towards getting the more ominous looking links removed (directories, reciprocal links from irrelevant sites etc.), either manually or with the disavow tool, how can I be sure that I am not removing links that are in fact helping our campaign? Are we likely to suffer from the next Penguin update if we chose to proceed without moving the aforementioned links? or is Google only likely to target the serious black hat links (link farms etc.)? Any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BallyhooLtd0