"Who Else Wants To Piggyback & Steal Authority Like Betty Does And Unlock The Vault To $1,000 Days Promoting The Hottest CPA And Affiliate Offers?"
Now, referrer cloaking is a different beast all together. Actually, it is a classic example of my favorite Japanese phrase - "same, not same."
Referrer cloaking is a scalpel. It's a
precision tool that lets me carve out my traffic into whatever pieces I want and feed them by hand.
Here's what's happening with referrer cloaking - every time you click on a link and your web browser brings up a page, it tells that website where you came from.
So you're on Google and
searching for cougar dating sites to promote as an affiliate. You click on a link to load up some CougarDatingSecrets.com (made that one up but it would be a great infoproduct!)...
When you do this the browser tells CougarDatingSecrets.com that you came from google.com. This is known as the HTTP referrer.
What Betty is doing is pretty simple. Every time someone tries to load their homepage they run a little PHP script that checks the HTTP referrer. If it's from googleads.com or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN, or AdSonar, or any other network they are buying traffic from, they send the visitor to the homepage -- they show the acai offer.
BUT... if the referrer is blank, or it's not on their super ninja list of ad network referrers, they redirect the visitor to Health.Discovery.com.
THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT. Pardon my French. Seriously.
Here we have Google using all these workers in low labor markets to check out ads. Well, what do they see?
The Discovery Health portal.
Just like it says in the display url.
What about the Google Adsense spiders?
Same portal. Unless you click on the ad you are going to be redirected to the Health.Discovery.com portal.
Worried about redirect? Haven't we all heard that redirects are "bad"... 'load of BS. Redirects are fine. It looks like a tracking URL. All tracking scripts use redirects - even Google.
So this simple little thing of grabbing the referrer and checking it against a list is pretty much all that's needed. Now, as it turns out, Betty does some other stealthy things. They drop a cookie on your computer so they can check later and make sure that they don't give you the wrong page (in case you're trying to spy on them). But that part isn't that important.