PDA

View Full Version : Accidental Cloaking Mystery - Google Adsense



aznbbj
May 20th, 2006, 02:41 PM
Hi everyone,

This isn't related to my adwords campaigns but I hope those of you with search engine optimization experience can help.

One of my websites is having problems display Google Adsense ads correctly:

http://www.padstyle.com

Just click on any of the category pages and you'll see public service announcements from Google near the top - "hurricane relief" / "katrina aid" - which is a sign that Google is having problems crawling my site.

I talked to Google Adsense support, and they said it's because my site is cloaking. The funny thing is, I didn't even know what cloaking was until they told me. Upon looking through my site and its code, I can't seem to figure out *how* I am cloaking.

And, from what I gather, you usually cloak to return a more search engine optimized site / text to the search engine spiders - and my site isn't even doing that; it's just returning a blank page.

Things I've done:
- Checked my .htaccess file
- Checked my robots.txt file
- Someone suggested removing the "^" character that I use to pass parameters in my pages (look at the URL address bar) - tried this, but it didn't change anything

Anyone have any ideas how I managed to accidentally cloak my site - and more importantly, how to uncloak it?

Thanks!

aznbbj
May 20th, 2006, 03:56 PM
Alrighty - looks like it was an issue with WP-PostRatings, a plugin I installed. I have removed it and am hoping that google crawls me successfully in the next day or so.

Admin - feel free to delete this post if you wish as it is no longer necessary.