Cloaking is good for?

[jacibenel]

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

 

[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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[Laser]

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.

 

[bakerious]

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.

 

[da buck]

I cloak to stay warm in the winter.

 

[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.

 

[shinkari]

phew . . . what u can learn with proper english

 

[qcp860]

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.

 

[JohnnyRabbit]

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

 

[Markthedude]

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.

 

[GreyWolf]

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.

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.

 

[beeHWfan]

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

 

[g83ii]

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

 

[machines-in-motion]

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!"

 

[darktimaeus]

cloaking so people don't see me

 

[momba12]

@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.

 

[mikeavery11]

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.

 

[greatgreat]

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.