Hi,
I'm new here, trying to undestrand the important of cloaking, anyone can explain me better?

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from of search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address.

Can someone tell me HOW this can be used... and hopefully not get sandboxed

thanks

Im new too. Just saw in the warrior forum a software to do this with a couple of clicks and looking for some info too. I think it works more for affiliate marketing or sales than for SEO purposes.

When you're building sites for search engines, you have two conflicting goals:

a) You want to show SE spiders an informative, keyword rich page with minimal or no affiliate links in order to rank highly and get lots of traffic.
b) You want to show surfers as little info as possible and lots of compelling ads in order to get the maximum CTR to your sponsor.

In general, cloaking enables you to fulfill both of these goals at the same time, by showing SE spiders a text and keyword heavy page, and showing surfers an ad-heavy page that will get lots of click throughs.

If you don't cloak then you have some tricky design issues to overcome to try to attain both conflicting outcomes on the same page; your CTR will never be as good showing a page with info + ads versus showing a page with just ads.

Keep in mind each page indexed in the search engines is a doorway leading to your sales page/ money page.

So your site might have how many pages indexed in google 1,,2,,5,10,20,50,,100,,? That was hard work to accomplish that much.

Now,,,,,,
with cloaking you can easily generate MASS amounts of pages.
Thousands per hour.
With cloaking you could have millions of pages leading to your sales page.

of course it is not safe it is a gamble.

Like dmadhatter said, cloaking is showing one website to bots, and another website to humans. The reason you want tot do this is to feed the bots a page that is full of content to get SERP positioning. The bot page is usually pretty basic, and generally created by scraping other relevant webpages for content, then mixing that content up to make it look unique. It is in all respects a very spammy looking page, and not something you want a human visitor to see.

When a human visits the same site, they are sent to a completely different page, usually a landing page built specifically for that keyword.

The advantage of cloaking is that you can for example, take a data feed of 1,000 products from Commission Junction or Share-a-sale, and create a cloaked page of content for each product to get it ranked in Google. A bot sees the keyword rich scraped content, and a human sees a landing page with the products picture, description and a link to click to buy it.

There is software that can create thousands of pages of cloaked content and do all the re-directing and even automatically build landing pages for each product. The problem I had using these systems is that no matter how good your scraped content is, your sites will be de-indexed by Google after a certain period of time. You have to constantly keep building new sites, thousands of them to make good money.

The best method is to use sub-domains built on aged .com domains that you already own, but this is expensive and time consuming when you first start out. Also, CJ and other networks will ban you if they catch you cloaking, so it is always a cat and mouse game.

I cloak to stay warm in the winter.

It's also when you are doing affiliate marketing and you want to make sure that you get paid for the sale.
Many times the affiliate link that the sellers provide has your ID in the URL, so anyone could remove it and buy the product without your affiliate ID, leaving you with no commission for a product that you sold.

phew . . . what u can learn with proper english

cloaking is a way to increase traffic to your money pages. It lets you focus on long tail keywords and then send traffic for those keyword pages directly to your offers.

So instead of a (traditional) article or presell landing page with a link that the visitor has to click on, with cloaking a human visitor is taken directly to the offer.

There are other uses of cloaking that are more white hat in nature but the main idea is to show the search engine spiders and the affiliate managers one thing and actual human visitors another.

Cloaking is good for when you are using a content blocker and need to hide urls

Originally Posted by bakerious

CJ and other networks will ban you if they catch you cloaking, so it is always a cat and mouse game.

I'm assuming that they won't ban you though it you are just cloaking on your main money site though right?

I have a feel that you mean you will get banned if you blast articles all over the web (spamming ones) with your links all over them (cloaked) leading them directly to the product page.

I currently cloak my money site ones so they don't get spooked when they see cj's crappy www(.)zxyw(.)com/adsfsdaf links that they give you.

Originally Posted by highsteam

Im new too. Just saw in the warrior forum a software to do this with a couple of clicks and looking for some info too. I think it works more for affiliate marketing or sales than for SEO purposes.

Originally Posted by juanle455

It's also when you are doing affiliate marketing and you want to make sure that you get paid for the sale.
Many times the affiliate link that the sellers provide has your ID in the URL, so anyone could remove it and buy the product without your affiliate ID, leaving you with no commission for a product that you sold.

@highsteam & @juanle455 - that's a different kind of cloaking than what most others in this thread are explaining. Since you brought it up though I'll give a brief example of what you're refering to.

You guys are talking about cloaking your ref links. Affiliate programs typically have really ugly urls when you use your ref code. In most cases it's really obvious where the target page is and a lot of people will just bypass the affiliate link and go straight to the product page. Some people do it because they're suspicious of the ?ref=xyz in the url, others might want to just sign up themselves so they'll get the commission instead of you. To combat that people like to cloak their affiliate links.

For example instead of making backlinks to a clickbank offer with your hoplink "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net" then on your site "yourdomain.com" create a redirect from "somegreatproduct" to your hoplink. You can make the redirect in your htaccess or do a metarefresh from a webpage, either way though you now have a url something like "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" which is much nicer looking url to give out or make backlinks to. (You can accomplish the same goal using a url shortening service like bit.ly but it won't be as appealing a url as using your own redirects.)

Now your prospects have to click on "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" to get to your affiliate offer sales page. Once they get there they'll still be able to sign up as a affiliate themselves, but for some reason not as many people will do that as would if you actually had them click on "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net". For whatever reason, doing this seems to have a positive effect on the click through ratio to a sales page.

So anyway, cloaking your affiliate links as I just explained is a completely different thing than the website cloaking examples given in this thread. The two concepts are unrelated and done for different reasons.

Hope that helps.

i always thought that cloaking protected your links so people could not use the info in the links to screw your account, and also to make it seem like there are no affiliate links when there are

cloaking is good for.... deceiving website visitors, affiliate networks, paid traffic networks...list goes on

It can also be an amazing prank tool:
Google: "Here is a nice and informative website with a step-by-step description of exactly what you want to do"
Website: "Surprise! Starfish porn!"

cloaking so people don't see me

Originally Posted by GreyWolf

@highsteam & @juanle455 - that's a different kind of cloaking than what most others in this thread are explaining. Since you brought it up though I'll give a brief example of what you're refering to.

You guys are talking about cloaking your ref links. Affiliate programs typically have really ugly urls when you use your ref code. In most cases it's really obvious where the target page is and a lot of people will just bypass the affiliate link and go straight to the product page. Some people do it because they're suspicious of the ?ref=xyz in the url, others might want to just sign up themselves so they'll get the commission instead of you. To combat that people like to cloak their affiliate links.

For example instead of making backlinks to a clickbank offer with your hoplink "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net" then on your site "yourdomain.com" create a redirect from "somegreatproduct" to your hoplink. You can make the redirect in your htaccess or do a metarefresh from a webpage, either way though you now have a url something like "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" which is much nicer looking url to give out or make backlinks to. (You can accomplish the same goal using a url shortening service like bit.ly but it won't be as appealing a url as using your own redirects.)

Now your prospects have to click on "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" to get to your affiliate offer sales page. Once they get there they'll still be able to sign up as a affiliate themselves, but for some reason not as many people will do that as would if you actually had them click on "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net". For whatever reason, doing this seems to have a positive effect on the click through ratio to a sales page.

So anyway, cloaking your affiliate links as I just explained is a completely different thing than the website cloaking examples given in this thread. The two concepts are unrelated and done for different reasons.

Hope that helps.

This seems like some great insight. Greywolf or anyone that knows more about this, are there any recommended plugins cloaking AF links? If there is a possibility that it helps CTR then I, and Im sure many others, would be interested in suggested plugins. Many thanks.

The advantage of cloaking is that you can for example, take a data feed of 1,000 products from Commission Junction or Share-a-sale, and create a cloaked page of content for each product to get it ranked in Google. A bot sees the keyword rich scraped content, and a human sees a landing page with the products picture, description and a link to click to buy it.

More over link cloaking is harmful for future of your sites. Google will deindexed your site after a months or few months.
So avoid link cloaking.

I'd also like to undestrand the important of cloaking. I'm not sure I get it. There is some great information on this thread though. I can totally see it as a prank tool.

If you don't know what cloaking is, you probably didn't need it yet, when you'll need it you'll be googling cloaking automatically, half-expecting what it means.

ahhh and here i thought cloaking was just DMR. Very Informative post.

It serves, multiple purposes

most common reasons are that it allows you to hide where your traffic is coming from
and allows your link to look more legit and presentable

Cloaking is bad for SEO.Cloaking is the the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Originally Posted by GreyWolf

Now your prospects have to click on "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" to get to your affiliate offer sales page. Once they get there they'll still be able to sign up as a affiliate themselves, but for some reason not as many people will do that as would if you actually had them click on "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net". For whatever reason, doing this seems to have a positive effect on the click through ratio to a sales page.

Lost you a little bit - you're saying that cloaking the aff link generally has a positive impact on your CTR?

Related question - I know aff managers tend to frown on certain types of activities (such as REAL cloaking which this thread is supposed to be about), but how do aff managers view simple link cloaking like this? Seems pretty harmless to me, so why should they care? But do they?

Back on topic for this thread, cloaked sites - wow, seems like a time and resource-intensive activity. I mean, the cat and mouse nature of it and the need to register lots of domains (if you keep using subs doesn't G just ban the tld?).... I guess if it's all BH (for backlinking to or direct use on your WH site seems like you're asking to get it banned) and you can make a few thousand per run it could be lucrative, but man....

Normallly I dont post in this section because people are just plain lazy and dont do any research before asking to be drip fed information or making statements that are wrong..
Cloaking is bad for SEO.
Wrong..and you know this because ???..do you think a skinny affiliate landing page is better for seo..
I can give the spiders original content..thats what they want.
Cloaking is the the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.
yeah..right!!
Serving up different results based on user agent
No one who is not retarded..would ever just use "user agent" to detect spiders..so that statement is half right..but 100% irrelevent...
Cloakers use ip primarily for detecting spiders..and there are different methods/combinations etc to do that.
For my money value..the best cloaking software I have ever used..is still wpcloaker by Dave..and I have used most of the software out there for years..
wpcloaker.xxx
I still have not lost one site when I did not spam the clackers out of them for backlinks..if you treat them like normal sites..you "generally" will never have a problem..and please..could some wit not bore us with "you might lose your site"...yes..no kidding..big flipping deal..
The guts of it is..I can present original content that is relevant to the spiders and a normal affiliate landing page to the buyers..and rank long tail keyword pages..
Its not for being "deceptive" to customers..!!
I am hardly likely to build up a site selling bikes..to then direct possible buyers of a bike to a porn landing page am I..??
If you dont have the intelligence and time to do some research using google..and think people have to bend over backwards explaining this stuff to you here..over and %$#@ over again..then dont cloak..simple eh.?
Read the cloaking section for about 20 minutes instead of asking the same $#@# questions..
How hard is that seriously..?

Originally Posted by dmadhatter

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from of search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address.

Can someone tell me HOW this can be used... and hopefully not get sandboxed

thanks

what is getting sandboxed?

Originally Posted by blazed1

what is getting sandboxed?

Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's the phenomena of having your site drop way way way down in the SERPs for a time while G figures out what to really do with your site. It can last for a while, but eventually your site might recover its former ranking. I think it can be triggered by many factors, such as being a new site (especially if you blast a new site with lots of backlinks) or even an old one that is undergoing lots of changes or extended spammy backlink blassts, etc.

Cloaking is a VERY broad subject and a complex field to play in. It can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing or you're using anything but the very latest techniques.

The general thought of cloaking is when you cloak your sites content. This is where you present search engine bots with one version of your content and real visitors with a different version.

Usually the bots see a highly optimized version of your content which would make a human turn and run.

Cloaking for SEO purposes is very risky and unless you use the best of the best tools and techniques then you can expect Google to catch you sooner rather than later and kick your ass clean out of the index.

If you accept this as part of the risk then go ahead but be prepared to lose domains as Google catches you out time and time again.

Good money can be made on the short term from cloaking which is why people still do it today.

Cloaking=churn and burn at it's highest level. Build em fast, let em die, cash in along the way

Cloaking is now used very often on compromised webpages with wordpress.

what is cloaking

Originally Posted by Hackulus

what is cloaking

Originally Posted by dmadhatter

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from of search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address.

Can someone tell me HOW this can be used... and hopefully not get sandboxed

thanks

And please feel free to scroll up this thread for your answer if the above doesn't answer if fully enough for you.

For those just coming to this thread, the following posts sum up both methods of cloaking for you.

Originally Posted by Autumn

When you're building sites for search engines, you have two conflicting goals:

a) You want to show SE spiders an informative, keyword rich page with minimal or no affiliate links in order to rank highly and get lots of traffic.
b) You want to show surfers as little info as possible and lots of compelling ads in order to get the maximum CTR to your sponsor.

In general, cloaking enables you to fulfill both of these goals at the same time, by showing SE spiders a text and keyword heavy page, and showing surfers an ad-heavy page that will get lots of click throughs.

If you don't cloak then you have some tricky design issues to overcome to try to attain both conflicting outcomes on the same page; your CTR will never be as good showing a page with info + ads versus showing a page with just ads.

Originally Posted by GreyWolf

@highsteam & @juanle455 - that's a different kind of cloaking than what most others in this thread are explaining. Since you brought it up though I'll give a brief example of what you're refering to.

You guys are talking about cloaking your ref links. Affiliate programs typically have really ugly urls when you use your ref code. In most cases it's really obvious where the target page is and a lot of people will just bypass the affiliate link and go straight to the product page. Some people do it because they're suspicious of the ?ref=xyz in the url, others might want to just sign up themselves so they'll get the commission instead of you. To combat that people like to cloak their affiliate links.

For example instead of making backlinks to a clickbank offer with your hoplink "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net" then on your site "yourdomain.com" create a redirect from "somegreatproduct" to your hoplink. You can make the redirect in your htaccess or do a metarefresh from a webpage, either way though you now have a url something like "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" which is much nicer looking url to give out or make backlinks to. (You can accomplish the same goal using a url shortening service like bit.ly but it won't be as appealing a url as using your own redirects.)

Now your prospects have to click on "yourdomain.com/somegreatproduct" to get to your affiliate offer sales page. Once they get there they'll still be able to sign up as a affiliate themselves, but for some reason not as many people will do that as would if you actually had them click on "affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net". For whatever reason, doing this seems to have a positive effect on the click through ratio to a sales page.

So anyway, cloaking your affiliate links as I just explained is a completely different thing than the website cloaking examples given in this thread. The two concepts are unrelated and done for different reasons.

Hope that helps.

Originally Posted by akiaki

Lost you a little bit - you're saying that cloaking the aff link generally has a positive impact on your CTR? ...

Yeah it can, but it depends on the type of link cloak. If you just use a url shortener like bit.ly or even clickbanks link cloaker, it still presents a link that might look suspect to someone, but if you cloak the link yourself with a redirect page on your own site like yourdomain.com/greatproduct then for a lot of people that link seems friendlier or more trustworthy. It's just a quirk in human nature. Keep in mind though that it will only make a difference to people that pay attention to the target url in the status bar when you mouse over a link.

...Related question - I know aff managers tend to frown on certain types of activities (such as REAL cloaking which this thread is supposed to be about), but how do aff managers view simple link cloaking like this? Seems pretty harmless to me, so why should they care? But do they? ...

I don't think most aff managers care about link cloaking as long as it's not done deceptively.

Which brings us to a third type of cloaking. If you're cloaking your link in such a way as to spoof or hide the referer then aff managers definitely will have a problem with it if they find out. This would be doing things similar to what was shown above about using a friendly url like "yourdomain.com/great offer" but doing something like a double meta-refresh to hide the original source of the traffic. This type of cloaking can be done in such a way as to make the traffic look like it originated on your whitehat site or in such a way to completely blank the referrer so it looks like direct traffic to the offer. In both cases "cloaking the referrer" is done to clean up traffic your generating from non-allowed sources.

... Back on topic for this thread, cloaked sites - wow, seems like a time and resource-intensive activity. I mean, the cat and mouse nature of it and the need to register lots of domains (if you keep using subs doesn't G just ban the tld?).... I guess if it's all BH (for backlinking to or direct use on your WH site seems like you're asking to get it banned) and you can make a few thousand per run it could be lucrative, but man....

Well it isn't so much that cloaking your site is a lot of work, just that if you do it wrong and get caught it'll make all the backlinks and work you've done pretty much worthless for that site. So in that sense it can mean a lot of work becoming pointless.


So anyway, after what I added about blanking the referrer that ups the list of cloaking definitions to three now. lol
(there's actually even a few more, but for now here's the three)

1. cloaking your links - typically whitehat (blackhat if it's deceptive). Purpose is to a)make it less likely for people to strip your aff code, b)make your ref links shorter for promoting on sites like twitter, c) make your ref links look more trustworthy.
   
2. cloaking the referrer - definitely blackhat. Purpose is to hide the non-allowed source of traffic your sending to CPA offers and make it look like legit traffic from a whitehat promotion.
   
3. cloaking your site - (the main topic in this thread) definitely blackhat. Purpose is to present content to the SE spiders that will give you SEO benefit, while presenting different content to actual visitors that might give your offers a higher conversion rate.

edit-
This is an example of why it's important to be specific when discussing topics. Asking a question about why cloaking is important or what it's good for is likely to get a lot of unrelated or conflicting answers unless you're specific in the type of cloaking you're talking about. The same is true about topics like "duplicate content" and many other SEO topics.

Many general terms are used for many different topics and an answer that might be true for one specific topic will be wrong for a different topic, even though it sounds perfectly logical in both situations. That simple fact alone has been the cause of many SEO myths and bad information being passed on.

how about someone explain cloaking for paid traffic sources.
cloaking facebook/google advertising destination links etc..

Originally Posted by vlshal

how about someone explain cloaking for paid traffic sources.
cloaking facebook/google advertising destination links etc..

I want to know this as well. I didn't want to ask since so many people are asking questions that were already answered and annoying everybody, but this is an angle that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.

How would you cloak a page from your paid traffic source moderators for approval?

this tecnique good for affiliate marketing, show professional method

Originally Posted by Affiliate X

Originally Posted by vlshal

how about someone explain cloaking for paid traffic sources.
cloaking facebook/google advertising destination links etc..

I want to know this as well. I didn't want to ask since so many people are asking questions that were already answered and annoying everybody, but this is an angle that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.

How would you cloak a page from your paid traffic source moderators for approval?

That would be the second type of cloaking mentioned in my previous post called cloaking the referrer (also known as blanking the referrer or spoofing the referrer).

Typically 'cloaking the referrer' is accomplished by directiing the traffic to a legitimate website you want the visitors to appear to be coming from, and then using a double meta refresh to redirect them to the offer. You can find many threads on bhw and other forums explaining in detail how to set it up properly.

Just use google search or the bhw advanced search to find out more information. Try searching for the following terms:
cloaking the referrer
spoofiing the referrer
blanking the referrer
double meta refresh
hiding traffic source
etc.

The importance if Cloacking is you can get high ranking faster with less effort.

do not cloak any of your pages...cloaking is the tech. of showing different content to the search engine spider than what is being shown to visitors.search engines are on to this practice and regularly check pages for cloaking.so avoid it unless you want to get banned in a hurry..

It might be a useful idea to just build a proper site with relevant content...

Cloaking is primarily used as a technique to increase the ranking of a website. It can also be used to trick a user into visiting a site (and downloading the content)，cloaking keeps the web page content free of extra code and allows the highly optimised pages to be seen only by the search engines.