Opinion on identifying this cloaking method and purpose.

Hey Mate,


I am following some websites, which are redirecting all their visitors to youtube, fb, google and aol. When you visit these websites, you will simply be redirected. But when you make a brief site:domain on Google, you see various post made by them. Now if you click them, you are still redirected. There is no IP delivery used here, i have checked this from various location. But there is a special post link, spread by user to user, once you visit the post link, you can then access the entire website, see and read post. But this doesn't make sense, why would anyone do this?

Another interesting finding is: these post rank on Google, but when you click on them - you are redirected to yahoo, or bing. So these post are not made for visitors.

The post have links in it, i think they are simply article submission links but then, why would someone use this technique?


I think its some sort of cloaking. I don't know which one and i don't know why it is used. What is the purpose of this and why is this used? I cant help but wonder. Do you think it has any SEO benefits?

It's a pretty old technique where you show google crawlers the site itself for the purpose of rankings, and send users to a different site. Now, it's possible they identify you with cookies hence you keep getting redirected, or, they wait for a specific time to send all users to some offers url by scheduling the cloaking process, or, all the IPs you test with are blocked and redirected simply cuz they have filtered these ips out (I assume u use VPS/VPN ips for each test you make)

What i wonder is if the backlinks placed on these sites will have more linkpower then a site not cloaked or redirected to high profile sites like G, yahoo and stuff. I dont think the only reason to do this is to hide these links for other people.

Yes i tried using VPN to check this. But really, what is the benefit of doing this? I mean, does it help you rank faster? or the power of link placed here is much higher? There are no affiliate links in the post and the articles on this domain rank on Google for certain keywords, but visitors cant open them. You know, that's not going to help right?

Appreciate more suggest on this mate. I wish to set up one but i want to first understand the implications of this.

With a cloaker you can easily generate millions of pages which will bring nice traffic when they get indexed. Traffic gets redirected to appropriate offer which will bring you money.
To get started with cloaking you will need a grand or two.