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. :-)

Originally Posted by Mrvegas

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. :-)

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/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-good.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-mean.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...iate-link.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ng-theory.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ng-expert.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-question.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...necessary.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ification.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-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.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

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/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-good.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-mean.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...iate-link.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ng-theory.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ng-expert.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-question.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...necessary.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...-cloaking.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ification.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...king-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.

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.

Originally Posted by maxxwilliams

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.

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 .

Originally Posted by klevolike

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.

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.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

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.

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.

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

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.

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.

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

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.

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

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

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.

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

Originally Posted by BENNY8877

This is exactly what cloaking is like MAGIC

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

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

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..

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

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..

The idea behind cloaking is simple your right showing the SE different content then a human user I guess i should have made myself clear to the OP advanced cloaking is far more in depth. If your cloaking and all u think it is...is writing content and the general idea of cloaking good luck but it's far more in depth then that.

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

The idea behind cloaking is simple your right showing the SE different content then a human user I guess i should have made myself clear to the OP advanced cloaking is far more in depth. If your cloaking and all u think it is...is writing content and the general idea of cloaking good luck but it's far more in depth then that.

Cloaking *IS* just displaying a different page to both SE's and users.

What you do with cloaking isn't cloaking.

I could create a cycling page with adsense, but I wouldn't start saying that adsense is cycling.

You can generate content then cloak that content, sure.

You can generate content then put adsense on that content.

You can generate content then put banners on that content.

You can generate content then put an opt in pop-up on them.

Would you say generating content is part of adsense?

Would you say generating content is part of cpa?

They're separate things.

You don't HAVE to generate content for a cloaking project. I personally would NEVER generate content even for cloaking. It's very hard to rank with generated content. People use generated content for web 2.0's and backlinks etc.

If you're going to generate 30k pages of content that rank for 30k keywords then cloak them then the cloaking part won't make it any easier for you to rank. If you could rank for 30k keywords you wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation with me, you would be sitting on a beach with some supermodel.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Cloaking *IS* just displaying a different page to both SE's and users.

What you do with cloaking isn't cloaking.

I could create a cycling page with adsense, but I wouldn't start saying that adsense is cycling.

You can generate content then cloak that content, sure.

You can generate content then put adsense on that content.

You can generate content then put banners on that content.

You can generate content then put an opt in pop-up on them.

Would you say generating content is part of adsense?

Would you say generating content is part of cpa?

They're separate things.

You don't HAVE to generate content for a cloaking project. I personally would NEVER generate content even for cloaking. It's very hard to rank with generated content. People use generated content for web 2.0's and backlinks etc.

If you're going to generate 30k pages of content that rank for 30k keywords then cloak them then the cloaking part won't make it any easier for you to rank. If you could rank for 30k keywords you wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation with me, you would be sitting on a beach with some supermodel.

actually i was sitting on the beach with a model a few weeks ago south beach however that's besides the point. Now ask yourself why would it be hard to rank for 1000 + long tail keywords providing u have the right tools to rank them with.

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

actually i was sitting on the beach with a model a few weeks ago south beach however that's besides the point. Now ask yourself why would it be hard to rank for 1000 + long tail keywords providing u have the right tools to rank them with.

Why indeed. If you can rank for 1000+ longtails on tap you must be making at least $100k/mo.

I've known many people who want to do that, but I've never known anyone to succeed with 1000's of longtails and generated content. Not since pre-2011 and more so pre-2009 anyway.

On the other hand I know many people who own authority sites with good unique content that are ranking for 1000's of terms.

It's not as easy as you think. If you opt for 1000+ domains then that's $10k plus you need them on separate IPs otherwise you risk getting penalized for having so many low quality sites.

If you have them all on the one domain then you'll struggle to get so many indexed. If you've ever tried to create that type of site you'll know how hard it is to get massive amounts of crap content indexed.

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Why indeed. If you can rank for 1000+ longtails on tap you must be making at least $100k/mo.

I've known many people who want to do that, but I've never known anyone to succeed with 1000's of longtails and generated content. Not since pre-2011 and more so pre-2009 anyway.

On the other hand I know many people who own authority sites with good unique content that are ranking for 1000's of terms.

It's not as easy as you think. If you opt for 1000+ domains then that's $10k plus you need them on separate IPs otherwise you risk getting penalized for having so many low quality sites.

If you have them all on the one domain then you'll struggle to get so many indexed. If you've ever tried to create that type of site you'll know how hard it is to get massive amounts of crap content indexed.

Trust me on this one, I talked to a few people here before i got into cloaking just to pick there brains you would be surprised at the $$$ don't get me wrong now fantomas shadow maker is just a tool and your going bust your ass working at it, but it does 85% of the work for you the other 15% is you building backlinks for the urls and a few other things not mention here, so time is still involved regarding putting in work but ranking for high competitive keywords is reachable with cloaking.

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

Trust me on this one, I talked to a few people here before i got into cloaking just to pick there brains you would be surprised at the $$$

Well, if you say you do generating content + cloaking then I believe you.

You've obviously cracked the method of ranking 1000's of keywords with generated content.

I can see that the way to do it would be to target 1000's of general longtails and cloak so you're displaying some sort of broad offer, dating or bizop. Something like emailing a scraped general list.

The hard part though is ranking those 1000's of keywords. Are you using one domain for all keywords or one domain for each keyword btw?

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Well, if you say you do generating content + cloaking then I believe you.

You've obviously cracked the method of ranking 1000's of keywords with generated content.

I can see that the way to do it would be to target 1000's of general longtails and cloak so you're displaying some sort of broad offer, dating or bizop. Something like emailing a scraped general list.

The hard part though is ranking those 1000's of keywords. Are you using one domain for all keywords or one domain for each keyword btw?

depends on how competitive the niche is, some sites will rank better then other's so u want as many as possible, But it's best to use 10-20 domains for 1 niche but use all the same keywords or u can split them up but i was taught it's going to be obvious to people your cloaking if u dominate one niche and all your pages are redirecting to the same URL LMAO the best way to cloak is using aged domains having multiple landers.

There are a few cloaking kings in here ranking for major keywords like weight loss & credit cards

Originally Posted by GreenGoblin

depends on how competitive the niche is, some sites will rank better then other's so u want as many as possible, But it's best to use 10-20 domains for 1 niche but use all the same keywords or u can split them up but i was taught it's going to be obvious to people your cloaking if u dominate one niche and all your pages are redirecting to the same URL LMAO the best way to cloak is using aged domains having multiple landers.

There are a few cloaking kings in here ranking for major keywords like weight loss & credit cards

Ah, I see, yes. The main problem comes from people reporting your cloaked page, so if you have 1k keywords in a niche all with the same page you'll get reported.

Reporting must still be a major issue even if you only have 50 keywords in a niche displaying the same page though, no?

That fantomas software looks pretty nice btw

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Ah, I see, yes. The main problem comes from people reporting your cloaked page, so if you have 1k keywords in a niche all with the same page you'll get reported.

Reporting must still be a major issue even if you only have 50 keywords in a niche displaying the same page though, no?

That fantomas software looks pretty nice btw

Yea getting ratted out is the problem which is why long tail keywords is better because a lot of competitors don't care much so u figure if your ranking for a lot of them you can generate a lot of traffic after that it's all about converting the traffic. But again your going to still put a lot of work in but with the right script you will cut your time down by more then half.

Fantomas shadow maker is sexy i will say that it's like the lambo of IM tools.

BLACKHIT download MOD schooled me to a lot regarding cloaking before I jumped in the fire thanks again

Go get um Blue...

Yeah...use your search engine on this site.

(of course...you would never get an answer or thread quite like this one).

Thanks for your input!

~D

Originally Posted by BlueTurtle

Well, if you say you do generating content + cloaking then I believe you.

You've obviously cracked the method of ranking 1000's of keywords with generated content.

I can see that the way to do it would be to target 1000's of general longtails and cloak so you're displaying some sort of broad offer, dating or bizop. Something like emailing a scraped general list.

The hard part though is ranking those 1000's of keywords. Are you using one domain for all keywords or one domain for each keyword btw?

Looks like starting a new thread wasnt such a bad idea after all, you never know whos going pop up or what advice is gonna be given, Interesting at the least

you will find lots of stuffs about cloaking online, fing them in article directories; however, you may learn the ways from valius free ebook and you can get tutorials on youtube as well.

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) method in which the matter offered to the search engine spider is dissimilar from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by deliver content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the webpage. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable.

The reason of cloaking is sometimes to trick search engines so they show the page when it would not otherwise be displayed also called black hat SEO. However, it can also be a functional though antiquated procedure for notify search engines of matter they would not otherwise be able to trace since it is embedded in non-textual containers such as certain Adobe Flash components or video.

Thanks!

You are very understanding. Im newbee , noobs or whatever and I agree that we are boring but Im trying ready everthing that I can before ask.
Anyways, some ppl are not really skilled and new here may will be asking asking.


Thanks guys for the help...

Originally Posted by Xenesthad

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.

This is not cloaking. This is link cloaking. It's completely different than cloaking a website.

Ohhh right

Cloacking is a back seo techinque, this is an unethical method which means to present different instances of a webpage, one for users and the other for search engines.

Thank You all for this info-very helpfully for newbies like me...

thanks for all the info - lots I didn't know here

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address. It's a deceptive method used to cheat search engines in order to rank well for desired keywords.

haha,thanks for your tread ,I dont need to ask this again.

damn! Never knew about cloaking

imma save up some dough and then buy myself a copy of fantomas shadow maker. Any pro here wanna teach me some cloaking tricks

thanks for the info

There were alot of posts to answer a simple question......

and there was me thinking it was something from Star Trek....!!