Cloaking What it is

Do the search engines allow this. If they discover what you are doing will they reduce your page ranking?

Often when you get a high ranking page under quality keywords the first thing that will happen is your page gets stolen (called PageJacking). Often that page is stolen just to put up a duplicate some where and reduce your rankings. Yes, that is what happens with many engines. They see the duplicate and think "duplicate" and mysteriously your page disappears in the next search engine update.

So, it's easy to imagine what happens on what's regarding cloaking. Search engine cloaking is just one aspect of a much bigger picture. This is why search engines can't even consider banning cloaking. It is so widespread and pervasive, they'd have to delete 1/4th of the domains in their indexes - those would be the best sites they have listed.

There are 5 types of cloaking:

* User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking)
* IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking)
* IP and User Agent Cloaking (IPUA Cloaking).
* Referral based cloaking.
* Session based cloaking.

1) User Agent cloaking is good for taking care of specific agents. Wap, Wml pages for the cell phone crowd.
Active X for the IE crowd.
Quality css from the Moz and Opera crowd.
Nice black screen for the web tv'ers.
Specialty content for agents (eg: NoSmartTags, GoogleBot Noarchive)
No sense in sending out stuff with js, java, or flash than a user can't actually run.
2) IP Address Cloaking is good for taking care of demographic groups. Language file generation for various countries.
Advertising delivery based on geo data.
Pages built for broad band users.
Low impact pages for overseas users.
User-time-of-day determination and custom content based on tod geo data (news, sports weather..etc)
Specifically targeting demo groups such as AOL, Mindspring etal.
3) IP and Agent cloaking is good for a combo of the above. Custom content for AOL'ers using Wap phones.
Ads based upon geo data and user agent support.
The possibilities for targeting are almost endless. You'll run out of ways to reroll it before you run out of ips and agents to serve.
Indexability. Just getting your site fully indexed can be a challenge in some environments (flash, shock).
4) Referrer based cloaking is basing delivery on specific referral strings. It is good for content generation such as overriding frames (about.com, ask jeeves, and the google image cache).
Preventing unwanted Hotlinking to your graphics.
5) Session based cloaking. Sites that use session tracking (either from ip, or cookies), can do incredible things with content. We've all seen session cloaking in action on dynamic sites were custom content was generated for us.

With the assault of rogue spiders most sites are under, the growing trend of framing, agents that threaten your hrefs (smarttags), cloaking has a very bright future. The majority of the top 2000 sites on the net use some form of the above styles of cloaking (including ALL major search engines).

and hundred of pages on the Cloaking issue....to be found on:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Cloaking/ :hitit:

A lot of big website use cloaking too. I have heard Amazon.com uses cloaking.

I am currently using cloaking on a non essential domain and I am starting to see some un-godly spider activity. Below is the number of time the spiders have been to my site since the begining of the month. I am not sure what I am going to so about band width. If anyone wants to know what program(s) I am using let me know and I will send you links.

Googlebot 1874+8
Inktomi Slurp 1462+287
AskJeeves 445+3
MSNBot 336+50

Sounds like cheating to me. Is it really necessary to cloak? I mean, with everybody trying to out-"cloak" each other, the results would be back to square one. It's just like trying to win a race by installing turbo-chargers, then the other fellow follows suit, and still you don't have that much advantage in speed but you sure did spent a thousand bucks more for some fancy equipment.

Is anyone still getting good rankings from black-hat cloaking?

Why is it so many people online call cloaking cheating LOL

Show me a who in God's name decides the rules ?

The search engine you say well they all cloak too ....

spywarz said:

Sounds like cheating to me. Is it really necessary to cloak? I mean, with everybody trying to out-"cloak" each other, the results would be back to square one. It's just like trying to win a race by installing turbo-chargers, then the other fellow follows suit, and still you don't have that much advantage in speed but you sure did spent a thousand bucks more for some fancy equipment.

Click to expand...

It may or may not be cheating, but if it works then black hats will use it.

spywarz said:

Sounds like cheating to me. Is it really necessary to cloak? I mean, with everybody trying to out-"cloak" each other, the results would be back to square one. It's just like trying to win a race by installing turbo-chargers, then the other fellow follows suit, and still you don't have that much advantage in speed but you sure did spent a thousand bucks more for some fancy equipment.

Click to expand...

It may or may not be cheating, but if it works then black hats will use it.

what program or script is better for referral cloaking?

Cloaking works great for some niches but is horrible for others. For example I have about 30 cloaked sites setup for music/lyrics because there are TONS of long tail keywords such as "download new eminem cd for free" nobody is really targetting that keyword so its not hard to get in the top 10 or even top 3 for that term and thousands of others like it.

Very interesting stuff

indeed, just cant wait.

Thanks, I was wondering what it was

anyone use a cloaking program? I saw one once for $200 bucks, think its worth it?