I have recently started working on some cloaking stuff, and i can't say that i am making money from cloaking so far but i can see its potential. I mean i can drive 1000 unique per day to my sites but the problem is that this traffic won't convert. If i can make even %10 of this traffic convert, i am sure i can make $xxx a week.
What is your success with cloaking? Anyone who wants to share his experience?

If you are not converting then its not the cloaking per se, its either your sales page. your product is not what they want ie too expensive,better products elsewhere or you are driving the wrong visitor to it. Cloaking is fantastic for driving large amounts of visitors to niche markets.

I cloak just about everything in one way or another, it's an essential tool for blackhatting.

Like xu123 said, cloaking in itself won't make you more or less money. The main objectives of cloaking are a) to get more traffic through delivering more optimized pages to SE spiders; b) making more money by redirecting surfers directly to ad pages or sales pages without showing them any annoying free content.

Say you have a blog with some banners on it that gets 1000 hits per day. You might realistically get a 10% CTR to your sponsor and convert 1:500, meaning you get 100 clicks on your ads per day and then get a sale every 5 days on average.

I might cloak the same site and redirect all the traffic directly to the sponsor. Now I'm sending 1000 hits per day to the sponsor; however, it won't convert as well, because people aren't voluntarily clicking on my ads to visit the sponsor; instead, I'm just forcing them to go there. However, the ratio might realistically be 1:1000 - 1:1500. So now I'm getting a sale every 2-3 days.

That has to be balanced against the risk of getting banned.

Of course, not all cloaking is a straight out redirect; it's arguably better to just cloak parts of the page eg. delivering more text (or more optimized text) to SE spiders, more blatant ads to certain browsers depending on whether they have javascript enabled etc. Remember you can cloak js and css too, not just html files.

I just start doing the cloaking stuff but like to know what type of backlink method you all using to get the backlinks to your cloaked site so that the cloaked site will index faster and also rank high on search engine? I am not good on doing the backlinks thing and need some advice here.

Actually i have little success of making some money with clickbank and affiliate program using my cloaked site but it took me around 2-3 month time to see that kind of results and it also not really consistent because now my cloaked site getting less index page.

So like to know normally how long can see a good result when doing the clokaing stuff with correct backlink system?

Thanks

affiliate marketing without cloak dont work =P

ive been doing search engine cloaking for 2 years now. like the other dude said.. if your getting traffic then cloaking isnt yoru problem, its your offer / conversion.
make a custom landing page or choose an offer that doesnt look like shit and you'll get your conversions

I have about 20-30 sites and each of them are promoting 50-100 products. I am driving cloaked traffic to these sites using keyword lists with hundred of keywords. And i can see what keyword people are using to get redirect to my sites. In some cases i have relevant products to these keywords but these keywords haven't converted to sales.

By the way, does anyone know forums dedicated only on cloaking, doorway pages and stuff like that?

Ok, you are getting traffic, that's great so the real issue here is conversion.

Here's what I do (and this works well).

First create a MySQL database that has all your keywords in it (e.g. "my red widgets") and affiliate links of sites that sell "my red widgets"

Then in your "in-between" page when a visitor comes in pull apart the referring query (e.g. ?q=my+red+widgets becomes my red widgets) so you now have exactly what they were looking for.

Then run this query against the database in the first step to find those merchants that sell "my red widgets" e.g. Get back the affiliate link and then redirect them to *that* affiliate. Watch our conversions go through the roof.

Also, you are getting traffic, cookie stuff them too in your intermediate page

I hope this makes some sort of sense

Cheers
MDS

Because your cloaked feeder sites will typically be targeting (very) long tail keyword phrases you'll do more bulk linkbuilding to the feeder sites and then to a lesser extent traditional mininet/pyramid/linkpush to them.

As the previous replies have said it is important to not just get traffic to the feeder sites but to make sure the traffic is going to a converting offer. Tracking keywords and split testing offers is the best way to do this here.

What do you think is the future of the cloaking sites and cloaking software? Do you think some day google bots can start detecting which is cloaking site and which not and stop indexing them?

If google find that you are cloaking then they remove your website, they know about it and it is definitely against their policy. In the past big names such as the new York times were actually removed from the index so if they find your little site doing it, you are gone!

I know if they find the site is cloaked they will remove it from the index, but now the cloaking sites are indexing by google and have some time of existence before they get caught by google and deindexed. I am asking for the time when google bots will detect that the sites are cloaked and will not index them at all. Is this possible to happen in the future?

Hi, good cloaking software will fool the bots into thinking that you are not cloaking and if they do not know you are cloaking then they can't find out

Basically, you want real-time IP updates, e.g for *every visitor* when a bot arrives the software should check the IP to see if it is from Google (Reverse / Forward DNS). Then there are things like checksums, e.g. making sure your cloaked page is the same size as the non-cloaked page, lots of little things (Like don;t cloak every page in your website).

Cloaking is not hard, you just have to be very specific about what you do

Cheers
MDS