What is cloaking?

bloomtools said:

Cloaking is a technique where in the content presented to the robot is different from that presented to the user's browser.

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charlesando said:

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. 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 purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed (black hat SEO). However, it can also be a functional (though antiquated) technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components.

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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 - 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.

GreyWolf said:

That's actually a different type of cloaking than what the OP was asking about in his first post.

I believe the OP was asking about cloaking 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.


You gave a good explanation about what cloaking a site is and you were accurate in how you described it. But presenting different content to the search engines than you do to real traffic is a completely different type of cloaking.

When discussing the topic of cloaking there's basically three different types of cloaking (there's actually even a few more, but these three are the most common).

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 - 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.

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.

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mr_vampire said:

There is an awesome wordpress plugin called "Affiliate link cloaking" . It cloaks a link and also shows statistics of clicks.

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