Hey everyone. What are your thoughts and ideas on cloaking? Will it get you banned? I have noticed WebmasterWorld does it with their forums and doesn't seam to effect them in google??
cloaking is also known as stealth.. It is a technique used by some sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else.. cloaking is a black hat seo, it can lead your site to be penalized or get banned so its bad..
cloaking is one of the Black hat SEO tecqniques, As far as i know it's really bad in SEO. But a lot of webmasters used this technique but in Different way, I mean in strategy on how to cloak a certain pages or site...
"Some" types of cloaking are ok, for instance showing a text or HTML version to non-flash enabled browsers (robots). It's when you start trying to be deceptive to manipulate rankings that problems can/will occur. Unless you clearly know what you are doing, and have an excellent reason for cloaking i'd avoid it. Speaking of WebmasterWorld, i like their cloaked Robots.txt Cloaked - http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt Non Cloaked - http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt
Thanks for the responses guys. I wasn't sure if it was bad or not..Basically since my homepage is done in flash, I would like to have a html type page for the se's but when the visitors click my link I would like them to reach the flash page..Is there a safe/non black hat way of doing this?? any info is appriciated
cloaking is a unethical techniques where in one site is optimized for search engine and then redirects it to other site. What search engine see is different from what the users sees. Of course your site will get banned because the site that has been optimized for search engine contains spammy keywords to rank in SE.
Rubbish! Cloaking: "A technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances." So if i implement user agent identification and serve up a low-bandwidth web page version to mobile devices to enhance usability i will be banned? If i have code to display an Internet Explorer optimized page to those users i will be banned? Technically if page.php?sid=12345 is requested and i serve up /seo-friendly.html via a 301 redirect it's cloaking the true URL. Tell me this, what if you show pages that require registration or subscription to Google but a log-in to users not logged in. Is this cloaking? Really no because you are not showing different content to robots then you are to logged in users. Big sites like NYT, WebmasterWorld etc use cloaking but they are not banned. Cloaking isn't necessarily bad, it can be quite beneficial. Really it helps if you understand something before hitting reply.
forget about it....you dont wanna get banned from G. maybe you can try putting an html converter on your page....what do you think guys? am i making sense?
Wow... So on an SEO forum I didn't expect to see this stuff. There is NOTHING wrong with cloaking. It's all a question of what kind of site it is. If it's a generated, scraped, or otherwise automated site, go for it. Cloak away. Yeah, you'll get banned. My cloaker gives my sites in moderately competitive fields a shelf life of about 20 days of ranking high in the search engines. And it makes money. Now if you're working your butt off on a site, yeah, don't cloak. You shouldn't have to. Your work should speak for itself. But come on guys, YOU never get banned from google. Your SITE does. That's $3-5. Less if you use subdomains.
Psh. It's bad for the one site in the short term. And even then, not if you swing it properly. Keep in mind, I'm mostly black/grayhat (I saw no others of my type here, but I saw no rules against BH here, so I'm going to roll with this from a BH point of view) Long term, cloaking does fine. You just need to make sure you have a lot of sites, not just relying on one. My content for example, is randomally generated based on the URL itself(converting the url to a integer, using it as a seed). The template is selected by the same strategy. So I can pump out 10 seemingly unique sites just by pointing different subdomains to the same directory. From there, funnel the search engine traffic(not bots) into a WH site. The WH site itself (at least in my experience) never gets banned(otherwise, people would point Blackhat sites to competitors). Since the Whitehat site gets the exposure, it slowly garners backlinks(organically) for having decent content. The blackhat sites take forever to get banned from google, and for a LONG time afterwards, get traffic from yahoo/msn. And when it does get banned, it barely cost me anything. So you make short term money from the traffic funneled blackhat style into the whitehat site, and long term money as the whitehat site begins to gather backlinks. Welcome to the wild wild west.
From Wikipedia Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. Here is one link describes cloaking for newspaper with registered user. Check it: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3613561 Yes for short term, you can take advantage by using Cloaking. Here one question arises: would you like to take profit from your project either for long term or for short term?
Yes for short term, you can take advantage by using Cloaking. Here one question arises: would you like to take profit from your project either for long term or for short term?[/QUOTE] ARGH no one here gets it. Whitehat and Blackhat. They're for different things. Ok, so you don't want to get penalized? Create a new domain, private registration. Make 5-10 subdomains. Preferably, point it to a different IP. Hosting from hostmonster is $4.85/month, and there's others that are cheaper. Consider this your blackhat host. Get a decent cloaker. Fantomaster makes a good one, or if you PM me, I can give you code for dynamically identifying bots (it will put some server stress for a little bit, so start small). Stuff the keywords like crazy. Get your links however. Link spam(XRumer is good), blogs, I don't care. For that matter, you can start the site out WH, get your links in, then change the site immediately after the links appear to be a blackhat, cloaked site. RSSGM/MyGen/Yacg are good content generators if you're not a coder. Anywho, you make it so legit search engine traffic REDIRECTS to your whitehat site. Google does not penalize that. If they did, I'd redirect my traffic to all my competitors. That way, you get blackhat benefit, minus the heat. I'm not sure how adsense deals with this, but I DOUBT a ban, because it makes it too easy to sabotage competitors. If you want to be ghetto, pay some offshore workers to make a lot of blogspot blogs, write yourself an auto updater. Use an external javascript redirect(once again, on a different host), and cloak the javascript against any search engine bot seeing it. Any traffic the blog takes redirects to you.
Some people on these forums seem not to like reading the authors post... He is not asking how to impliment clocking as a black hat seo method... (@ xmcp... my god...) he wants to know if he can do it and not have it viewed black hat related. The answer also has already been answered: Yes
Yeah, read the post initially, but it kinda branches out from there sometimes. Especially when I get frustrated with people. How about this. To bring it back around to what the thread was initially about, I'll give a straight answer. The reason they don't get nailed is because they have an already established site, because the content is REALLY there if someone signs up, because you can (kinda) see the content when you get there, so there's not spam complaints, because they have NOT disallowed use of the cache, and because those smart enough to file the spam complaint, are smart enough to use the cache, and are satisfied. If you fullfill all those requirements, then something similar *MAY* work for you. Just make sure they can see that you kinda sorta have the content, or the internet vigilante crazies will report it and google might not be so understanding.