{"id":244,"date":"2024-12-20T15:20:20","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T15:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/recleudo.com\/?page_id=244"},"modified":"2024-12-21T08:29:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T08:29:56","slug":"under-googles-watchfull-eye-getting-out-of-a-manual-site-reputation-abuse-penalty-and-continuing-business-as-usual","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/recleudo.com\/under-googles-watchfull-eye-getting-out-of-a-manual-site-reputation-abuse-penalty-and-continuing-business-as-usual\/","title":{"rendered":"Under Google\u00b4s Watchfull Eye: Getting out of a manual site reputation abuse penalty and continuing business as usual"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve already seen how Finixio\/Clickout\u2019s assets were hit with serious penalties<\/a> in the days following Google\u2019s algorithm update. I have no idea whether those penalties were manual, or algorithmically applied, though I have a hunch they were manual. But they destroyed the ranking of pages that funnelled, collectively, millions of visits a month into a network of gambling and crypto sites. (We will be back with the lowdown on that later.) For now, we\u2019re concerned with how Finixio\u2019s parasite SEO system has weathered the storm, trimmed sails, and continues to get away with the loot.<\/p>\n

Before we go any further, I have never seen anyone get out from under a penalty this fast. It\u2019s honestly impressive, and apart from anything else it presents a real masterclass in getting away with it. These people are seriously good at what they do.<\/p>\n

Just what is that, exactly?<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve used a mixture of redirects and cloaking to conceal the fact that in just a few days, they\u2019re back in business in a way that\u2019s fundamentally unchanged, deceiving Google once again<\/strong> and showing the capacity of well-developed parasite SEO operations to evade even crushing, sitewide penalties.<\/p>\n

(If you\u2019re unfamiliar with parasite SEO and Finixio\/Clickout Media, and you\u2019d like to read an increasingly wild story about it, check out my first post here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Getting away with it<\/h2>\n

In this post, I\u2019m going to focus on a few of Finixio\/Clickout Media\u2019s websites to tell the wider story while still offering a decent level of detail.<\/p>\n

Techopedia gets the most traffic (by a long way, when it\u2019s not staggering under the load of a Google penalty), and ranks for a lot more keywords than other known Finixio assets like ReadWrite. And I\u2019ve already done enough digging to go fairly deep into what they\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be looking at a couple of other sites, like cryptonews.com, newsbtc.com, pokerscout and cardplayer.com. As often happens, it\u2019s very difficult to say for sure what level of involvement Finixio\/Clickout has with these sites, though cryptonews.com is a known Finixio asset.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll also introduce you to CoinTelegraph. CoinTelegraph is a different beast because Finixio don\u2019t own it (I don\u2019t think). Instead it illustrates another part of their parasite operation and shows how adaptable and effective it\u2019s possible to be when you\u2019re determined to outwit Google and you have the resources to act fast and at scale.<\/p>\n

The penalties to Finixio\/Clickout assets<\/h2>\n

The penalties, as far as I can figure out, were applied on December 2 this year, and they hit several sites I covered in my original post, including readwrite.com, business2community.com and techopedia.com hard. I already covered the detail on this in a separate post,<\/a> so I\u2019m going to give a really light touch here.<\/p>\n

Techopedia<\/h3>\n

Techopedia started life as a solid tech site. Now, it\u2019s a front for gambling and crypto. When it was penalized, it experienced a massive crash in traffic and rankings.<\/p>\n

Obviously these are estimates, but SEMRush sees Techopedia\u2019s traffic fall by 64% over the month from November 17, from over six million to just under three, and then down to just over one.
\n\"Semrush<\/p>\n

Those red marks on the dates at the bottom show days when there were major changes, perhaps caused by Google\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n

This image from Ahrefs shows the picture even more starkly:<\/p>\n

\"AhrefsThat\u2019s not a \u2018decline.\u2019 That\u2019s a cliff.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, Ahref\u2019s traffic estimates are probably more accurate. But traffic to a website you don\u2019t own is always more difficult to ascertain. Ranking, on the other hand, is easier. And rankings were destroyed by this penalty.<\/p>\n

\"TechopediaThis is pages that used to rank in the top five, falling to page two or three. That\u2019s nowhere, they may as well not exist.<\/p>\n

Readwrite<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s the same story over at ReadWrite:\"ReadWrite:<\/span>Keywords and traffic fell off a cliff here too, though it\u2019s not as clear a picture.<\/p>\n

Business2community.com<\/h3>\n

Business2Community suffered a similar fate:<\/p>\n

\"business2community<\/p>\n

Traffic and keywords fell hard. Because of the way Ahrefs calculates traffic, changes can look more spread out than they actually are, so sudden events get smoothed into the curve. But this is the sight of three quarters of the site\u2019s traffic being lost.<\/p>\n

How Finixio\/Clickout dealt with the penalty at first<\/h2>\n

We can break down what they did to deal with the penalty in two broad ways:<\/p>\n

1:<\/strong> Gambling pages went down. Pages were just removed from the site, sometimes so quickly and clumsily that they remained in navigation or you could still follow internal links to them, you just got a 404 if you tried it. This was a necessary first step: in order to get out of a sitewide penalty, the company removed all the content that violated Google\u2019s site reputation abuse policy, so the site was no longer in violation.<\/p>\n

2:<\/strong> SEO juice was redirected from penalized domains to other domains owned by the same company, Finixio\/Clickout. 301 redirects, theoretically permanent, were used to shunt the domain authority of the sites they\u2019re parasitizing on, over to other assets in their network. Interestingly, the focus on crypto and gambling actually became clearer here as they often redirected to single-purpose sites that looked more like squeeze pages than traditional websites.<\/p>\n

In less than a week, everything was back up<\/h2>\n

Now, however, things have changed. All the gambling content that disappeared? It\u2019s back up.<\/p>\n

I thought this would happen. In fact, I was so sure about it I ran a poll<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"MyOver half of respondents thought it would be less than a week. (So did I.) It was actually just a few days before all their gambling content was simply back online.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s shot back up the rankings too, even if it hasn\u2019t quite reached its old, dominant positions. Here\u2019s the part of the site that targets the UK:<\/p>\n

\"techopediaSome of these pages are still in the Forbidden Zone of page two or worse, but look at the \u2018change\u2019 column: they\u2019ve leapt by 10, 20, 30 places since November 1. And nearly half the pages here are new pages that didn\u2019t exist before the penalty. They\u2019ve responded to being penalized by actually expanding the operation!<\/p>\n

Now that they\u2019re out of penalty, are they abiding by Google\u2019s guidelines? Uh\u2026 404 <\/span><\/h2>\n

Gambling is back up, all across the affected sites. It\u2019s just cloaked to conceal it from the eyes of any manual reviewer.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the top search result for \u2018Casino utan spelpaus,\u2019 one of Techopedia\u2019s core gambling terms. This page is about accessing casinos that don\u2019t require licensing from the Swedish gambling authorities. The relevant page URL is https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/se\/gambling\/casino-utan-svensk-licens<\/a>, but you can see my search term here.<\/p>\n

\"Techopedia<\/p>\n

These are the top three results from a Swedish server.<\/p>\n

Techopedia.com is definitely owned by Finixio\/Clickout Media. spaceportsweden.com probably is, in my opinion. Casinon-utan-svensk-licens.bet, well, that is as blackhat as they come, using a very clever cloaking method to conceal factmata.com, but that is an article for another time.<\/p>\n

As of December 19, techopedia.com\/se\/gambling\/casino-utan-svensk-licens looked like this:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Techopedia<\/p>\n

\u2026if you went there from a German server.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s Swedish for \u2018missing article.\u2019 Which is interesting, partly because it\u2019s not the vanilla 404 message from Techopedia. If I go to a deliberately dud URL that I know doesn\u2019t exist on that site, here\u2019s what I get:<\/p>\n

\"techopedia<\/p>\n

The URL techopedia.com\/se\/gambling\/casino-utan-licens<\/a> doesn\u2019t actually exist, so I get \u2018sorry, we can\u2019t find the page you\u2019re looking for.\u2019 The visual appearance is different too.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also interesting because the only reason this looks like this is, their servers think I\u2019m in Frankfurt. If I move the dial on my VPN so they think I\u2019m in Sweden\u2026<\/p>\n

\"techopedia<\/p>\n

The content can be displayed after all. Funny.<\/p>\n

Since I took these screenshots, Techopedia have added content to their non-Swedish versions of this page. Now, whether my IP is in Frankfurt or California, the page looks like this:<\/p>\n

\"techopedia<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the non-Swedish version.<\/p>\n

The Swedish version is still markedly different though:<\/p>\n

\"techopedia<\/p>\n

Those are the same section of the page. On non-Swedish location versions the visitor gets served a quick guide to the sort of stuff you should probably be looking for in a casino without a Swedish license. On the Swedish version, the visitor gets a toplist that contains several sites we\u2019ll be meeting repeatedly throughout this post, including Mega Dice, Lucky Block, and Instant Casino. Some of these I strongly suspect are Finixio assets, while Lucky Block is owned through a shell company<\/a> by Finixio\u2019s Head of Business Development, Scott Ryder.<\/p>\n

The page is showing different content depending on where you are in the world. I\u2019m tempted to call this \u2018geocloaking\u2019 \u2014 like geolocking, but for a deliberately deceptive or evasive purpose. It\u2019s definitely an example of cloaking as Google describes it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Showing people from different places different content makes sense. There\u2019s normally no point showing me Japanese or US products and pricing, I live in Europe. And people often prefer their own language. So most big websites clock your IP and offer or just give you the local version. So far, so good.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not what\u2019s happening here. The global version of this page is an \u2018oops, don\u2019t know what you mean\u2019 page, not the same text in a different language.<\/p>\n

Makes sense: most people outside Sweden have no reason to care about Swedish gambling laws. But then, why conceal the content of the page? And why do it in Swedish<\/i>? After all, it\u2019s not like there\u2019s a whole lot of people outside Sweden (OK, Finland and maybe Minnesota) who speak Swedish. No \u2014 if you\u2019re talking Swedish, you\u2019re talking to Swedish people.<\/p>\n

To me, this looks a lot like a trick I\u2019ve seen Finixio sites pull in the past. They\u2019ll conceal a page from visitors in one location and reveal it in another, to bypass regulatory attention. There are pages for Dutch casinos on Techopedia that are visible on mobile or from outside Holland, but not on desktop from within Holland. These are pages in Dutch, about Dutch gambling laws. Who else but the Dutch could they reasonably be aimed at?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a video of me coming to the Swedish page from outside Sweden, then from inside:<\/h3>\n