Who Is Cashing in on Rachael Ray?

Is it a case of excellent domain name investing? Cloaking? Both?

You see, the other day, the hosts of American Idol were on the popular cooking show hosted by Rachael Ray. This sent the search term “Rachael Ray” straight to #1 on Google Trends.

What was number two? Well, according to Garry Conn, is was a site called rachelray.com.

What’s interesting to note is that A) the name is spelled incorrectly…it’s “Rachael”, not “Rachel” and B) this site redirects straight to Amazon.

This domain name was apparently purchased in 2001. This person clearly waited a long time for any kind of payoff (has Rachael Ray ever dominated Trends before?…I don’t know).

My biggest question is, HOW did this person get such excellent ranking within Google if the page is nothing but a redirect to Amazon?

Possibility #1: The site itself doesn’t have great ranking in the SERP’s…it’s just that people looking for Rachael Ray must type in this domain name, spelling it incorrectly, and this guy cashes in.

Possibility #2: This guy is cloaking. Cloaking is when you show the search engines different content than that which you show regular web surfers.

For example, let’s say I go out and buy the domain name bluewidgets.com. If I were to use cloaking, I would have a script that closely examines WHERE my visitors are coming from. When I see the Googlebot come to my site, I would show it a nice, content rich site filled with articles about blue widgets.

When anyone ELSE visits the site, however, I would throw is a redirect right to Amazon’s blue widgets page with my affiliate link embedded. The result? I cash in.

This technique is, in my opinion, very time-consuming and very hard to sustain over the long haul because you would have to constantly stay updated as to the Googlebot’s latest tricks. I’ve never really tried it and the one time I did try it, I found it to be very complex. Still, it seems that some webmasters make quite a nice living this way.

So what is the owner of rachelray.com doing? I don’t know for sure but my guess would be…cashing in!