What is Cloaking ?

Hello friends
I am new user here and also new in SEO. So please tell me something about cloaking..

Firstly, a quick search around the forum and you would have an answer within seconds, especially from within the "Cloaking" Sub-forum, but i'll bite. Cloaking is essentially a way of hiding or disguising your affiliate links. So for example if you were doing a review for a product with the aim of promoting it via your affiliate link then you would have to give them a link to click.
Now on your affiliate network you would be given a special URL linking to the product so they can identify that the sale has been generated by you. However, you don't want the potential customers to be able to see that your review is just a disguised promotion so you will want to make sure that they can't see your affiliate URL when they click it. Firstly because it might make them distrust the legitimacy of the information and secondly because it looks messy with random characters and also your affiliate ID.
So the idea of cloaking is to make the link they click look much nicer and far more legitimate. This can be done simply by using a service like bit.ly or others to shorten your link, and then insert that instead of your affiliate URL (it will still lead the user there but it will look nicer) or you can get plugins (if you are using wordpress) and some themes have an affiliate cloaker built in. Sorry for the length of this but i figured if i was gonna answer i may as well answer properly.

What is Xenesthad is referring to is "link cloaking" or referer hiding. I personally don't call that cloaking. link hiding is easy. its just rewriting a url. nothing fancy.
Real cloaking is much more advanced then link cloaking. With cloaking you are delivering different content to for example a spider bot and a real website visitor. There are many different ways to do some proper cloaking. Usually its IP and User agent based. But you can also cloak geolocation, organization and other identifiers like behavior. If you plan to do cloaking I would advice you to do some extensive reading and testing. Bots, spiders, manual reviewers change their tactics all the time to catch the cloaked sites. Therefore there are not many (seo, ppc) cloackers out there, because the risk of being slapped is high.

FYI Any technique you can find here is propably already known by G. So be creative. They probably also learned here about it first. Or any other blackhat forum.

Mrvegas said:

What is Xenesthad is referring to is "link cloaking" or referer hiding. I personally don't call that cloaking. link hiding is easy. its just rewriting a url. nothing fancy.
Real cloaking is much more advanced then link cloaking. With cloaking you are delivering different content to for example a spider bot and a real website visitor. There are many different ways to do some proper cloaking. Usually its IP and User agent based. But you can also cloak geolocation, organization and other identifiers like behavior. If you plan to do cloaking I would advice you to do some extensive reading and testing. Bots, spiders, manual reviewers change their tactics all the time to catch the cloaked sites. Therefore there are not many (seo, ppc) cloackers out there, because the risk of being slapped is high.

FYI Any technique you can find here is propably already known by G. So be creative. They probably also learned here about it first. Or any other blackhat forum.

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thanks for this info.. im new also in SEO

Not to kick you in the head or anything but something simple like this could've been searched for either here or in G.

yea, cloaking could be important in cpa game. so learn fast

its like camouflage

Probably one of the most blackhat techniques. In my opinion it is something to stay away from.

Cloaking is to change your link too look much nicer and more likely to be click. Affiliates link usually look very spammy if dun cloak. Hope that help.

lol in short url shortener.

Amazing that people have been asking what cloaking is for the past 7 years on bhw yet you've opened up another thread? Was that really necessary?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/393170-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/344531-cloaking-good.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/347417-what-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/333112-what-does-cloaking-mean.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/341494-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/325225-what-stage-do-you-start-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blogging/305138-cloaking-affiliate-link.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/92447-what-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/64219-cloaking-theory.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/hire-freelancer/52238-need-cloaking-expert.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/44401-cloaking-question.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/35195-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/26952-what-exactly-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/26663-cloaking-necessary.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/17617-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/3076-cloaking-clarification.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/14-cloaking-what.html



Ok, so how do you expect to make a fucking dime in marketing if you can't find the answer to a simple question that was first answered on the 1st Nov 2005? 7 years ago for fuck sake. Do you people need to keep opening up the same threads over and over and over and over and over.

If you can't search on bhw for a simple question then you have NO chance of making any money online, because it requires the ability to seek out the information you need without asking to be spoon fed.

BlueTurtle said:

Amazing that people have been asking what cloaking is for the past 7 years on bhw yet you've opened up another thread? Was that really necessary?

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/393170-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/344531-cloaking-good.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/347417-what-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...enerators/333112-what-does-cloaking-mean.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/341494-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh.../325225-what-stage-do-you-start-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blogging/305138-cloaking-affiliate-link.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/92447-what-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/64219-cloaking-theory.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/hire-freelancer/52238-need-cloaking-expert.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/44401-cloaking-question.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/35195-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...t-generators/26952-what-exactly-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/26663-cloaking-necessary.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/17617-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...t-generators/3076-cloaking-clarification.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/14-cloaking-what.html



Ok, so how do you expect to make a fucking dime in marketing if you can't find the answer to a simple question that was first answered on the 1st Nov 2005? 7 years ago for fuck sake. Do you people need to keep opening up the same threads over and over and over and over and over.

If you can't search on bhw for a simple question then you have NO chance of making any money online, because it requires the ability to seek out the information you need without asking to be spoon fed.

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You need to relax man. Some people don't know where they can find the answers, or didn't know a thread of their question existed, so they took their time to make a new one with their version of the identical question.

Sometimes noobs are annoying I know, but have respect and just answer their questions. After all, you could have done something more productive than scrape up all those archived threads on cloaking, rather than replied here.

maxxwilliams said:

You need to relax man. Some people don't know where they can find the answers, or didn't know a thread of their question existed, so they took their time to make a new one with their version of the identical question.

Sometimes noobs are annoying I know, but have respect and just answer their questions. After all, you could have done something more productive than scrape up all those archived threads on cloaking, rather than replied here.

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I could have done something more productive? Like give an incorrect answer on what cloaking is like most have done above maybe?

Pasting 15 threads discussing cloaking is a hell of a lot more productive than giving some incorrect answer like "cloaking is when you mask your cpa links" or "cloaking is essential in blackhat". It's not just the OP who doesn't know what cloaking is, 90% of the people answering him have no clue, so why don't you go and attack them? Maybe because you didn't pick up on all the wrong answers I suspect.

so a user might not know answers or how to find them you can guide them , and some answers might be outdated. What is cloaking in general , and his next questin might be what benefits it can give him, and what are the risks.

Cloaking can be very risky but also very rewarding. You won't have to wait months or years to get decent ranking and you can do a million terms without having to write the content for it. Also yo should never host the white hat sites , and blackhat (cloaking) sites on the same host or same ip adress.

Before starting to learn about cloaking you should learn basic Seo at first so you should know at least how to set up such a software. Blackhat tools are very expensive and if you don't know how to work with them you will be on the negative side quickly. You would also need additional tools, like Xrumer , Bookmarking software, etc to back it up and also to know how to design ranking pyramids .

klevolike said:

Cloaking can be very risky but also very rewarding. You won't have to wait months or years to get decent ranking and you can do a million terms without having to write the content for it. Also yo should never host the white hat sites , and blackhat (cloaking) sites on the same host or same ip adress.

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lol what a load of utter crap. I bet you've never made a cent online in your life. You're just here spouting nonsense to appear like some sort of authority.

How can you rank for a million terms without having to write content for it? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard on blackhatworld, seriously.

You still have to write content for the search engines. Cloaking only allows you to display something different for users other than what the SE's see. Ie, you can write a 1000 page keyword rich article for the SE's but display a graphical squeeze page.

A million terms. rofl. If you could rank for a million terms without writing any content then you'd be a very rich guy.

BlueTurtle said:

lol what a load of utter crap. I bet you've never made a cent online in your life. You're just here spouting nonsense to appear like some sort of authority.

How can you rank for a million terms without having to write content for it? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard on blackhatworld, seriously.

You still have to write content for the search engines. Cloaking only allows you to display something different for users other than what the SE's see. Ie, you can write a 1000 page keyword rich article for the SE's but display a graphical squeeze page.

A million terms. rofl. If you could rank for a million terms without writing any content then you'd be a very rich guy.

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actually, he some what right...im not gonna say millions of keywords but thousands of long tail keywords yes, fantomas shadow maker makes that possible because it generates 30k pages of unique content which is the whole purpose of cloaking. It would be useless to cloak if u don't have a script that generates unique content. You can rank for diamond keywords also I don't know how long it will last until someone rats you out for cloaking but cloaking is the best thing since slice bread, anyway if i had to write content for the SE may as well make a white hat site there's no purpose in cloaking in the first place if your just gonna write the content.

GreenGoblin said:

actually, he some what right...im not gonna say millions of keywords but thousands of long tail keywords yes, fantomas shadow maker makes that possible. You can rank for diamond keywords also I don't know how long it will last until someone rats you out for cloaking but cloaking is the best thing since slice bread.

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You can't rank for thousands of terms with cloaking. Cloaking has nothing to do with allowing you to rank for large numbers of terms without content.

You STILL have to write content for EVERY keyword you want to rank for.

Cloaking allows you to use search engine unfriendly features like heavy flash, graphics, ads with very little content and still rank because the SE only see the content and the users see the graphics.

It's also used to rank for a term while showing a completely different type of page to users.

So you could try to rank for "voucher codes" then show them a biz op lander.

In no way can you use cloaking to rank for 1000's of keywords without writing content.

Generating content is not the purpose of cloaking. Generating content is something separate from cloaking. You can generate content and then not cloak.

GreenGoblin said:

anyway if i had to write content for the SE may as well make a white hat site there's no purpose in cloaking in the first place if your just gonna write the content.

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You've got the totally wrong idea about cloaking. There's no difference between generating 30k pages with ads and generating 30k pages and cloaking. If you generate 30k pages then it ain't whitehat

Straight from wikipedia:

"Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking

BlueTurtle said:

You can't rank for thousands of terms with cloaking. Cloaking has nothing to do with allowing you to rank for large numbers of terms without content.

You STILL have to write content for EVERY keyword you want to rank for.

Cloaking allows you to use search engine unfriendly features like heavy flash, graphics, ads with very little content and still rank because the SE only see the content and the users see the graphics.

It's also used to rank for a term while showing a completely different type of page to users.

So you could try to rank for "voucher codes" then show them a biz op lander.

In no way can you use cloaking to rank for 1000's of keywords without writing content.

Generating content is not the purpose of cloaking. Generating content is something separate from cloaking. You can generate content and then not cloak.

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if you have a script that generates unique content why are u writing it? you didn't read a word i typed, anyway OP this is your best answer

BENNY8877 said:

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This is exactly what cloaking is like MAGIC

GreenGoblin said:

if you have a script that generates unique content why are u writing it?

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But generating unique content has nothing to do with cloaking. That's just another blackhat technique.

People generate unique content for adsense pages, autoblogs or just general sites. It's not whitehat if you generate.

I also read every word you typed very carefully and you're wrong. You simply can't sit there and say cloaking is generating unique content. Cloaking is cloaking. See the wikipedia definition above and if you disagree with wikipedia, well..