What is Cloaking and How Does it Work?
Posted on June 23rd, 2008 in Cloaking
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First off, Nickycakes would like to wish Nickycakes a happy 25th birthday. Lets hope UPS doesn’t try to pull anything funny and leave one of those retarded yellow “sign me” slips instead of birthday gifts. With the meager ad earnings from the blog wasting space in the paypal account, the Cakes decided to treat himself to a new flatscreen monitor to make the dual monitor thing happen a little better than it is currently. Hopefully that arrives today. Should make Call of Duty 4 look nice and purdy. Also, check out this amazing article that took place the day the Cakes was born: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/06/dayintech_0623
Anyway, back on topic. What is cloaking and how does it work? There are a few things in the SEO/Internet Marketing industry that are referred to as “cloaking” but today the Cakes is talking about search engine cloaking. Cloaking is the staple of many a blackhat-seo, but the specifics are often misunderstood.
The basic idea is, you show the search engine bots something different than the user sees. For example, Goog thinks your page is full of 5000 words of keyword rich content, but when joe blow clicks on your listing in the search engines, he is forwarded to an affiliate offer instead. Pretty simple in theory, right?
So, why cloak? Can’t you just fit keyword rich content on your site and rank it in the search engines like normal people? Sure. But some people would rather auto-generate 10,000 pages of crappy barely-readable content with tons of keywords in the time it takes you to make/pay for 1/10th of your spiffy legit website. The user never even gets subjected to your crappy design skills, they just get direct linked to whatever, while the search engine bots, and their limited sense of asthetic value, happily index the garbage.
Uhh, ok so how does it work exactly? Here’s the only real tough part about search engine cloaking. How can you determine if a visitor is a search engine bot, a human, or maybe a manual reviewer person from Goog? Well there are several ways.
- UserAgent of the visitor is the most obvious. This piece of browser stored data tells a website what software is being used to access it. Many website crawling bots happily announce exactly what they are, making things easy. However, these days this is unreliable. The major search engines, especially G, love to use UserAgents that match normal users when checking up on sites, making this method not 100% reliable.
- The Referer of the visitor is also sent by the browser when visiting a website. This piece of data shows where the visitor came from to get to your site. A referer of “http://www.google.com/search?q=nickycakes” will tell you that the user likely got to this site by searching goog for “nickycakes”. So you can send anyone who ISN’T coming to your site with a referer from a search engine to your generated content. Much like the UserAgent, this can be easily faked, so it’s not good to rely on this entirely.
- IP Address is probably the next thing to look at. Most people don’t know this, but you can look up the owners of ip addresses. You can also look up what ip address ranges certain companies own. The major search engines own a ton of them, and with a little digging you can find exactly what these ranges are as a starting point of who to show the bogus content to.
- Your own list is the last, but probably most important thing you will need, and is also the hardest to get ahold of. Basically, there are site indexing bots that are designed to look exactly like normal users in order to fool cloaking scripts and find blackhat sites to send to the ban conveyor belt. They are, however, stupid. The best way to make a list of incoming ip addresses that are bots requires that you have a site or sites that are indexed pretty frequently. Basically you make a page on your site that records ip addresses and link to it from your site in such a way that a user would find it very difficult to find said link and click on it. There are various ways of doing this so feel free to use your imagination for once.
With all this data, it gets pretty freakin easy. You look at the data, determine if the user is likely a moron websurfer, and if so, send him on his merry way to your order form for whatever, mailing list signup, zip submit, rickroll, whatever. If it’s not likely to be a normal person, you serve them your keyword rich awesome content, which then gets indexed in your favorite search engine.
Scripts that do exactly this are sold for thousands of dollars, and it’s pretty obvious that you can just save your money and do it yourself. Obviously the Cakes isn’t going to post any source code for this type of stuff, because even if he had it, he wouldn’t want thousands of digital point retards running around ruining the internet, now would he. Hopefully there’s enough info here for a bright person to get some ideas, but not enough to ruin the fun for everyone =))
Keep it real.
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:14 am
Happy Birthday Young Grasshopper!
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:15 am
Happy Birthday cakes. You are 1 year and 5 days older than me.
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:20 am
Happy birthday old man!!!!!!!
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:05 am
Happy Birthday, Cakes.
No, it’s BirthdayCakes today.
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:40 am
Happy Birthday!
Hm and nothing else to say.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
Happy Birthday! The UPS guy is pretty much like a ninja; I would hang out all day in front of your front door if you want to catch him. Even then he will probably find a way to drop the yellow slip unnoticed.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hey
First of all Happy Bday!!
Can u tell me what is the Affiate company’s opinion on these websites? Do they allow them?
Thanks
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
Happy B’day Cakes!!
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:51 am
Happy Birthday NC!!!!!
Keep up the great work. One of the best blogs around in my opinion!
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Happy Birthday Nickycakes!
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Go easy on the cake, Cakes.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
What really annoys me about the ‘make your own list’ option, is that it’s so obvious, why haven’t I already figured it out for myself & actually done it on my sites?
Oh & Happy Birthday Cakes
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Happy Birthday man…hope u got your delivery
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Happy Birthday!
You’re exactly 1 day younger than me.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I can still remember the sunny June morning after Nick was born. It was the most marvelous day of my life to that point. AS I left the hospital I was elated, awed. Filled with wonder by the fact that every person I saw was some father’s child, who was as much a miracle to their father as Nick was to me.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
happy birthday
cakes camp ‘08?..
$4999 burning a hole in my pocket
June 24th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Have a great birthday Nick
June 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Happy birthday Cakes.
Something I don’t understand about cloaking, or maybe SEO in general. Lots of what I read about SEO says the page content isn’t that helpful for getting ranked, it’s more about backlinks and the anchor text of those backlinks. Onpage content is still important, it’s just that on a scale of 1 to 10 it probably rates a 3 while backlinks rate a 9.
So, since cloaking is mainly a technique for presenting KW stuffed content to the search engines, and onpage content isn’t *that* critical for ranking, why is cloaking such a big deal? I mean, why go through all the work of figuring out who’s a bot and who’s a human, plus taking the risk that you’ll fuck up and a Google manual reviewer finds your cloaked site and bans it?
I guess what I’m saying is, is cloaking worth all the work and risk when onpage content is way less important than backlinks?
June 24th, 2008 at 11:51 am
@trumpetblast who says you can’t give the pages backlinks?
June 24th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Sure you can give them backlinks.
I’m just wondering whether cloaking is too much risk for too little reward?
June 24th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Crazy. My birthday is today and I am turning 25. Happy B-day man!
June 24th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Happy Birthday dude!
June 24th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
@trumpetblast: where’s the risk exactly?
June 25th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Happy birthday blahblahblah..
I’m starting to get the impression that you arent impressed with the readership at Digital Point.. They aren’t ALL retarded.. Shawn seems pretty sharp..
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Ok, Cakes. Now it’s time to tell how to build links to a cloaked site. I made some good cloaked sites, got 700 hits from G in 48 hours and a lot of spider activity. But I still think that u need links no mater u cloak or not. Now, since there is a chance of banning , I won’t want to spend as much time as I spend building links to a WH site! Confused…
July 5th, 2008 at 8:30 am
These days, it isn’t enough to sit around installing sites and scripts into sub-directories by hand. I personally know of many people who are happy to create just a few web sites per day. Unfortunately, this eats up a lot of time and it can be VERY mind-numbing! Plus, there are hundreds if not thousands of people already doing it this way.
Now, I’m not trying to knock this method of site-building. If this method works for you and is making you the income you want, then don’t change a thing.
Personally, I’ve found that the more pages I can build each day, the more income I’ll make. I’m building hundreds of sites with thousands of pages each and every day, and I usually finish them all before lunch .
How do I do it? Custom software! We’ll get more into that in a few minutes, but first I want to tell you what I discovered about page-generation that took me from earning virtually nothing to a monthly income of well over 5 figures.
Over the last few years I have met dozens of people playing the page-generation game, some of whom have become great friends. The amount of money these people made each month varied — anywhere from $5 to $50,000 per month.
As my own business finally started to take shape, I realized what separated the low earners from the high earners. It wasn’t secret keyword lists. It wasn’t a page-generator that no one else had.