San Diego-based Web hosting provider Aplus.net has been accused of using web sites of its customers in order to promote its
own search engine rankings. The accusers are the users of the Webhosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com) message board which
predicate that the company was using their sites without their knowledge. Aplus.net has supposedly displayed optimized pages
to search engine spiders and unmodified pages to real users.
According to the claims of the message board users Aplus.net might be inserting code, containing links to its home page, into
users' sites. This way after visited by search engine crawlers, the links can enable the increase of search engine
rankings. The company, however, did not give immediate responds to requests for comment.
The claims of users have been supported by Aplus.net's Google rankings. Taking account of the web sites of the greatest web
hosting provider Google has found out that 17,300 pages link to link to Aplus.net while 2,070 link to Interland.com and
1,040 to cihost.com. Google suggests that the linking codes that appear in the source code of the Google's cached copies of
some Aplus.net-hosted sites, but not in the sites themselves, have been added without the knowledge of site owners.
In a reaction to the alleged cloaking some web hosting Talk users think of resorting to blacklisting of their sites by search
engines. This step could be taken as search engine companies usually impose a penalty on link cloaking.
