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Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 6:45 pm Post subject: cloaking, paid listings not listed and no answer from hedir
Hi,
Around Jan 15th 2008 I submitted 2 paid advertisements. One has never been listed and the other was listed for about a month until I noticed hedir was cloaking that page and sent an email about it to bret@hedir. Soon after that email the listing was removed along with another listing which was not being served to search bots, probably so that it would look like the cached version of the page so no one would know HEDIR was using cloaking. This all seems pretty sketchy to me.
It says in the TOS that if a paid advertisement isn't listed 75% of the money will be refunded within 14 days and it's well past that time and I haven't received anything.
In addition, I haven't been able to contact anyone at HEDIR. Bret hasn't gotten back to me even though he probably saw my email because my listing was removed within an hour after the email and it had been up for a month. The support@hedir email bounced back, the phone number listed in the About Us page on this site is not in service and when I called the number in the whois lookup for this site I got some guy who claimed it was his cell phone and that he didn't know anything about HEDIR.
Can anyone help me with this? This is getting pretty frustrating.
Brian, I will apologize for your troubles although I am a powerless volunteer and I don't know anything. I don't think there is a deliberate attempt to scam anyone - I think there is just some disarray at Hedir that has not been resolved yet.
"andrew" is the only person who has
logged in lately who says he is connected to Hedir (but he seems to be
the programmer, not someone in charge of the accounting.) We have not seen a post in a long time from a person who claims to be from Hedir management.
Thanks for your help. I guess someone from hedir must have been around to approve the paid listing last month and then remove it earlier this week. I don't know if they see the forum posts but Bret is listed as the admin and I've seen that he has made a post as recent as Jan 28th 2008.
I guess the next step would be to either contact Internext Technologies (CEO appears to be someone by the name of Vikas Kedia) who receives the payments or open up a paypal dispute. I'll wait a few days and see what comes of this first.
Ok, this is getting amusing. The link has magically reappeared and the other link which was never listed has now been listed. I guess someone is watching the forum or Bret read his email. Still haven't received a response though.
The problem is they are still cloaking both pages where my links are, effectively hiding the links from the search engines and nullifying any search engine benefits. Cloaking is against Google's quality guidelines and is generally considered a black-hat search engine optimization technique.
They are probably hiding certain links from the search engines because they are worried about recent penalties given to certain directories. If this is the case, this is very deceptive and immoral to those paying for a listing, and guys, if you are reading this, you had better stop cloaking the links or you will be reported to Google's webspam team and then you will really be hit with a nice penalty.
This has wasted so much of my time and my company's time that it is now costing a lot more than the initial $25 submission fee. I hope you guys get your act together.
I'm volunteer here too and like grrrl I'd like to apologize although I can't help you with this. Where do you see the cloaking? If I check the page-source I see 2 straight links to http://www.blogworkx.com and http://www.mountainside-medical.com (oops, am I helping you with these links? ) However, I see an error with the first link-text.
Hi,
One of the pages that is being cloaked is the health link that I posted above. You cannot see cloaking by looking at the page source. The page source is just the html code. You need a 'bot' or 'spider' to verify cloaking. Google uses the Googlebot to index pages. The link was on the page from Jan 15th or so until earlier this week. Checking the cache from Jan 29th (it has since been updated), you can see that Google's cache of the page didn't show those 2 links even though if a person went to that page on that day, they would see the links. I can give more examples but I suspect this is happening sitewide.
On a side note, posting links in the forum doesn't actually help search engine wise since the links are nofollow.
On a side note, posting links in the forum doesn't actually help search engine wise since the links are nofollow. Wink
Forgot about that, not that I believe Google on this point but here's a little secret I'd like to share based on 2 year HEDIR experience: blogworkx.com and mountainside-medical.com. Guess what? No rel="nofollow" on these links. I know this because this is another never-resolved-issue on HEDIR. I had several discussions about this problem.
About the cloaking: strange indeed. I can't believe it! I've checked with user-agent switched to Googlebot and the links appear. When I check the page with lynx textbrowser, the links aren't there. Then I checked with some online spider simulators and they all return no links to your sites. Still, I can't believe HEDIR has gone this low on purpose, there must be something else going on. Either way, HEDIR admins should resolve this pronto!!!! _________________ Please review some sites.
Contributing members of the month
I've done a Google search on several domains I've submitted here (but were not approved yet) and I see links to forum posts that contain those urls.
Right, I meant that it's not going to give your site a boost in the search engine rankings but Google will certainly find "mydomain.com" in the forums or wherever whether it's nofollowed or not because it's just doing a literal search for the text "mydomain.com."
Quote:
Forgot about that, not that I believe Google on this point
True, there is some controversy about this and they may use some of the data especially within their user behaviour algorithms if people are clicking the links but, in general, I think most of it is not used or downplayed a lot especially when it comes to forums and blog posts where there is often a lot of spam that would really offset the search results if the links were counted.
Quote:
here's a little secret I'd like to share based on 2 year HEDIR experience: blogworkx.com and mountainside-medical.com. Guess what? No rel="nofollow" on these links. I know this because this is another never-resolved-issue on HEDIR. I had several discussions about this problem.Smile
Ah, good one. Using bbcode doesn't get nofollowed.
Actually, if you log out you will see that the links aren't there which means not only can search engines not see the links but most people can't either. The blogworx link isn't mine but I noticed it is in the same position and has a slash as its anchor text which can't be right.
I have opened up paypal disputes for both links and I notice they have a different email address than advertised on the site so we'll see if that catches their attention.
I think it's passed the point of being friendly. I've sent numerous emails with no answer and it's wasted a lot of my time. I've never had such horrible service from a directory. Even writergrrrl has left hedir as a supermod because the owners are not paying any attention to anyone.
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) However, I see an error with the first link-text.
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