Web page cloaking

For those of you who have been living under a rock, cloaking is defined as presenting one set of data to a search engine and a different set of data to a human.

There are all sorts of cloaking mechanisms, scripts, and programs. Any server-side language has the capability of doing cloaking work. What you choose would depend on the level of programming skills you have, your budget, the relative strength of the cloak you require, and the risk you are willing to take.

I only have one site that is cloaked. It uses a small php snippet to separate the wheat from the chaff. The user is not redirected. The snippet is quick acting and subject to being found at any time. The only reason the site is still active is because the target niche (and the long-tail) is relatively obscure. ie no competition to rat me out.

As I told you in another post, I believe that cloaking will be one of the ways that blackhat marketers will evolve. Or, more accurately, a combo of cloaking and great content will help assure the future.

After looking around for a few days, I have come to the realization that if I am to cloak with any degree of success, I need to learn a lot more about the business.

I consider myself fortunate to have made friends with one of the masters in the cloaking game. In fact, he may be the master. I have asked him if he would write us a primer on cloaking.

Look for an article on cloaking from Fantomaster in the very near future.

~dink