What is Cloaking ?

[odonk-odonk]

disguising something i think

 

[linkmonster]

great answering thanks ... well post to the Query asked

 

[LovervsFighter]

Great answers all-round.

Some suggesting cloaking is a good idea, others saying it'll get you banned.

What is the general thoughts from the BHW community on this:

I have a clickbank product I'm selling on my site. I've put a banner (provided by the product seller) on my sidebar and I want to use a cloaking plugin so when users hover over the banner (which is CLEARLY for an external page/site) they get a nice, neat URL - http://mysite.com/product - as opposed to the off putting 12412515jk1h5212uih1nj3462sdf.affiliate.username.c om.

I know this is probably the most common use of link cloaking but will it still increase the chances of my site being punished? Is there an acceptable way to cloak links in order to simply tidy them up?

 

[Generic]

Great answers all-round.

Some suggesting cloaking is a good idea, others saying it'll get you banned.

What is the general thoughts from the BHW community on this:

I have a clickbank product I'm selling on my site. I've put a banner (provided by the product seller) on my sidebar and I want to use a cloaking plugin so when users hover over the banner (which is CLEARLY for an external page/site) they get a nice, neat URL - mysite.com/product - as opposed to the off putting 12412515jk1h5212uih1nj3462sdf.affiliate.username.c om.

I know this is probably the most common use of link cloaking but will it still increase the chances of my site being punished? Is there an acceptable way to cloak links in order to simply tidy them up?

pretty links plugin google it

 

[crille30]

I cant say it much better, so:

"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."

great,even and old farth like me understand,thanks

 

[copperpanther]

don't use clocking because google don't like that.its harmful for your website.

 

[jay_nw]

don't use clocking because google don't like that.its harmful for your website.

Google seems like cloacking, all I see is full of spam in SERP now, many of them are cloaked sites when you seaerch for big money term keywords.

 

[themidiman]

Great answers all-round.

Some suggesting cloaking is a good idea, others saying it'll get you banned.

What is the general thoughts from the BHW community on this:

I have a clickbank product I'm selling on my site. I've put a banner (provided by the product seller) on my sidebar and I want to use a cloaking plugin so when users hover over the banner (which is CLEARLY for an external page/site) they get a nice, neat URL - http://mysite.com/product - as opposed to the off putting 12412515jk1h5212uih1nj3462sdf.affiliate.username.c om.

I know this is probably the most common use of link cloaking but will it still increase the chances of my site being punished? Is there an acceptable way to cloak links in order to simply tidy them up?

I would just do a simple .htaccess redirect. Simply add the following to the end of your .htaccess file. (Replace with your links)

Redirect /product http://youraffiliatelink.com

There is nothing wrong with doing this to your links, and most large ecommerce sites and others do it all the time.
The cloaking that gets you in trouble is stated above. Showing different pages to spiders and users.

 

[LittleBoots]

Some of the answers here are either C&P from wiki or some other sources, so I'll try and get this cleared up. Cloaking is displaying different pages to a Webspider/Webcrawler/SearchEngineCrawler and a different one to a normal user/customer/potential lead.

There are rumors around here that Google does not like affiliate links and that sites get penalized for linking to sites using affiliate links.
e.g.

www.amazon.com?affid=828282&prdctid=2626262

If Google views your webpage and you have got lots of these links all over your site, they might penalize you so what people do is they will craft a script that looks so see the user agent or IP of the visitor. So if script sees that GoogleBot is visiting the website, then the script will display a page that does not have affiliate links. If its a normal visitor with a user agent of Mozilla firefox then the script will show the page with the affiliate links. So what you want to show to google is

www.amazon.com?prdctid=2626262

This is used for sites not just with affiliate links, lets say you have an answer website, you want to show google that you have the answers to thousands of questions on PCs, Dating, health. BUT you dont want to show them that to access the site you have to fill in a CPA offer. The script will determine the visitor and display the results to the googlebot, yahoobot ect and will display the webpage with the CPA offer to the real visitor. This is best done with a PHP script as you don't then need to deal with URL redirects that spiders might pick up on.

EXAMPLE OF CLOAKING PHP CODE

<?php

    $userAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
    echo $userAgent . "<br />";
    
    
    if(stripos($userAgent, 'google' ) === FALSE)
        {
            echo 'This is not google bot, display affiliate links';
        }
        else 
        {
            echo 'This is google bot, hide affiliate links';
        }
    
?>

 

[LittleBoots]

No ones interested in my script? no feed back

 

[10everyday]

Your post is interesting something new I learned. I want to ask that can search engines find out easily that we are cloaking. I mean how safe it is.

 

[Byron2k12]

This is informative!

 

[Byron2k12]

"LITTLEBOOTS" No ones interested in my script? no feed back

It was excellent! Can you PM me i have questions

I need to know about this!!

 

[evejaa]

Very interesting information. Thanks for the post.

 

[niceseo]

what is adword clocking?

 

[avimcg]

good explanation

 

[maxsamuel]

Cloaking is the practice of serving different content to search engines spiders than is displayed to human users. The search engines view any form of cloaking as a misleading method of advertising, sending one set of content to their spiders aimed at obtaining good rankings for the content of that cloaked page, and to deliver a completely different set of content to the actual human users, most of whom arrived at this web site through deception.

 

[imonething]

Its putting a cloak over your affiliate links so they don't see them!!!!!

 

[Djarum16]

this is really some cake, opcorn: I wonder how would we put them into a good use

 

[SKY001]

Great answer thank you