Aplus.net, a large webhosting provider based out of California has been recently widely accused of a practice known as ‘Cloaking links’ on its customers websites, in order to achieve higher search rankings.

Users on message boards WebHostingTalk, HTTPTalk, among others, have said the company has placed secret code on customers’ websites that links to the company’s homepage. A recent Google Answers™ inquiry by an apparent customer of Aplus noted that Aplus’ company links code was shown in a Google description when a search query was performed for their site.

A member of Googles Answer service replied with a lengthy response saying “From this test, it appears that Aplus.net is hijacking this site when it determines that search engines are accessing it, for the purpose of placing it's own advertising information at the forefront when user's searching the internet are attempting to find this site.”

The Google researcher performed a test using Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer (http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html) which allows users to access websites under different User Agent identities. The Google researcher accessed the Aplus customer’s website under a standard Internet Explorer/Mozilla Identity, and found there to be no additional code. However, when the researcher accessed the site under the Google Bot’s identity, which is the crawler used by Google to search websites, the website returned the following code.

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<center style="visibility:hidden">
<a href="http://www.aplus.net">Web Hosting</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;
<a href="http://servers.aplus.net">Dedicated Servers</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;
<a href="http://domains.aplus.net">Domain Names</a> by Aplus.net
</center>

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Aplus Representatives during multiple phone calls on Thursday refused to comment on the situation, and commented that they were unaware of such allegations.

About Aplus.net
“Aplus.net is the Internet Services division of Abacus America, Inc. … Abacus America, Inc. is a privately held California corporation established in 1992. It provides quality Internet services nationwide. Other divisions include Rodopi Software – OSS software for the Internet Industry

More information
For more information, see the Google Answers™ thread at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=328399.

A discussion at WebHostingTalk is available at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=245379&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

A discussion at HTTPTalk is available at http://www.httptalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=775&highlight=aplus