iPowerWeb, Inc. – Search Engine Spammers?
May 4, 2006
I never thought the day would come when a hosting company might be able to give GoDaddy a run for their money when it comes to being the shittiest hosting company on the web, but today might be that day.
A couple of weeks ago we started tripping over all kinds of JavaScript redirected doorway pages coming from the domain pixiesmusic.com. The pages were coming from several different subdomains and covered dozens of different keyword topics. (Here’s some examples)
At first glance it just looks like a webmaster decided to try and make some quick cash, but Threadwatch is now reporting that the individual webmasters might not be responsible after all. From the comments in that thread, it looks like iPowerWeb is responsible for the cloaked content being served to Google.
Now think about that for just a moment…..
You register a domain and signup with a hosting company. That hosting company decides to make a quick buck off of all of its customers and begins cloaking content associated with your domain. The searches engines find the content and starting banning it. What are the odds that they ban the main domain along with the subdomains? I doubt it will happen in this particular case, but it certainly isn’t uncommon for search engines to do that when they find a large volume of subdomain spam.
If I had sites hosted at iPowerWeb, I’d be spending the rest of the day moving them somewhere else.
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7 Responses to “iPowerWeb, Inc. – Search Engine Spammers?”
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iPowerWeb is not the only hosting company who is doing shady tactics. Other hosting companies such as Aplus have also used cloaking and when they all get caught they just blame it on a tech guy and claim that they fired him.
Yep, we’ve seen this before - there’s a couple of webhosting companies that have tried various shady tactics, one of which is mentioned above.
Btw - have you tried your page entries on Firefox recently?
I use Firefox, and they look fine to me. Are you seeing a problem?
the name iPowerWeb makes my stomach turn inside out and ball up and start to travel up my esophagus turning me a pale yellow green with a nauseated puking feeling while my eyes turn to balls of raging red fire and my nose starts to bleed… Or something like that anyway. a few years go we set up some hosting accounts with them for ourselves and our clients and they were by far the shittiest web hosting i’ve ever experienced. they smelled of scam right from the first phone call. i absolutely wouldn’t put it past them.
It looks like Google has banned your example(s). I tried to find some subdomains still in Google, but it appears that they’ve removed them.
It seems they think Search Engines will never find out what they are doing and they will be successful in tricking Google..
Sounds like a lot of people have grounds to sue.