I see on too many sites tutorials on how to cloack your way to rankings. They all try to push their ideas and products but most of them avoid small bits of the truth that could change one's perception on such practices.
Last time I actually used cloaking in SEO was somewhere back in 2005-2006. Every sience I used Search Crawler IP detection just to lock away spoofs and googlebot wannabes.
I will try to explain here what cloaking is, how it works and why it WILL kill you. Banned cloaked sites are not a matter of IF but of WHEN. And with all the risk, people use cloaking so much instead of fine-tuning other 'tools'.
How come you don't cloak? You let me down dude! I'll unsubscribe your RSS feed.
… some might say. And my answer comes below.
Cloaking = Disguising. In terms of SEO it's also know as IP Delivery and it means sending different versions of the same page to different people based on custom rules. So let's say that if you detect a user coming from another country you could reroute him to a translated version of your content. There are some legit uses related to cloaking but to have a legit use a very small part of your page must change and the change must be relevant to some factors a visitor can assess. If he sees his flag in the corner of the page he'll know you cloaked the image to his benefit:) and you're cool.
But if you show the search engines cloaked, optimized (keyword stuffed) versions of your pages and the visitors a nice landing page to sell them something… you're dead meat.
I will take each method of cloaking and describe it here. I will show you the strong points and the weaknesses and estimate your cloaked site's lifespan. And trust me: life span for cloaked pages is short. I'll also provide some external resources to read on cloaking so you get an overall idea of how others see site cloaking vs. my view.
So brace yourself. There'll be a bit of content here.
I wasn't going to cover this but here it goes. This means checking for certain patterns in User-Agents and cloak based on what your scripts find there. I call this the butt-naked, bent-over in jail method. Imagine the outcome. Any kid with FireFox can change the user agent and see your cloaking. Take that for security.
My ratings:
Weak. Pathetic. Joke! Not worth rating!
I will get through this one very fast. There are some sources out there I will not even mention here as they are not worth it. Some folks out there provide some lists claiming to be crawlers and you're just supposed to take their word for it and do a leap of faith. As others have noticed:) using IP lists is just neither smart nor effective. It's easy to use no matter what your skills are, it's publicly available and it's completely unreliable and I'll explain why later on.
My ratings:
Made for amateurs. Suicidal. Leap of Faith!
There are some dudes out there offering Industrial Strength Cloaking for several thousand bucks. And if you're stupid enough you buy it. They provide IP lists, cloaking scripts and: 1. you pay thousands of bucks for something you can do for free and 2. you get banned after paying thousands.
My ratings:
Better than the previous two. So not worth the costs.
We finally got to the premium section. I covered this ip verification method and it's somehow safer then the rest but still not safe enough. The problem is only crawlers pass this verification method and any manual review will reveal your cloaking. That's not smart and I'll cover this later on.
My ratings:
Safer yet not safe.
We finally got to the best solution. This is not bulletproof either but will ensure a longer life than the one before… about 10 seconds more and I'll cover this also later on.
My ratings:
Best. But you'll get banned anyway if manually reviewed.
Biggest mistake one can do is to provide different content to manual reviewers from what you feed the search engines. If I were to work for Google and I would suspect a page cloaks I would visit it. If what I see is different compared to what the search engine has internally cached as contents of page I would not only ban that site but I would also feel offended. It's enough for an employee to change User-Agent to googlebot and proxy through an IP that verifies as a crawler and you're cloaking is unveiled.
Showing cloaked content to IPs withing the Google IP range is not only silly but offensive. Those people who work there are smart and if you feed their crawler cloaked pages show them the same thing. This will give you the 10 seconds I spoke about earlier. That is the time you need to enable an anonymous proxy and revisit you. And, at least they'll appreciate the fact that you did your homework and your cloaking is good. They might even let you live:)
It's safer but not safe. Google offers some services. A wireless transcoder, a translation service and all these services will get your page before they feed it to the end user using Google IP addresses. So you site can be exposed by using Google translate. The way to protect from this is to find their user agents and lock them out. Both these services have specific ID strings in the useragent. Do your homework here!
Remeber: Whois method, blocking Google services that feed your page to visitors, can be bulletproof to anything else except a manual review using a proxy server.
Useragent delivery is a joke. IP lists are outdated and unsafe. Crawler detection only detects dedicated crawlers but so many other Google IPs don't pass the crawler DNS check. Let's say IP: x.x.x.x is a crawler and you get a visit from x.x.x.x+1 which does not resolve to a crawler. You send them the uncloaked content: you die. As a small hint think like this: once you validate an IP as google crawler you are safe to assume the entire C-Class (x.x.x.*) belongs to Google. This is one more layer of protection for you.
I'll try to explain here the problems and these are the steps a cloaked site follows to die.
I'm pretty sure cloaking detection and elmination (banning) is never a completely automated process. Maybe some flags are raised automatically but in the end it's a human that casts the death penalty. So a cloaked site is a paradox. If it doesn't rank you don't make money and it doesn't get banned. If you rank you make a bit of money, it's reported and it gets banned. This is where cloaking lost me. It's not worth it especially now when you don't rank as fast as you did in the old days when I used such tactics.
It's one of those methods that exists, is used but kept in low profile. It's not difficult but also a game of finesse. It's a combination of user-agent/ip-delivery that is bulletproof to anything except a Google employee. I won't share the scripts and details for this, not for free and not publicly but remeber… you will be banned.
I wanted to open your eyes and get you aware of the truth behind the sparkling of all the cloaking products out there. You should now understand that you are not safe no matter how much you pay. An angry competitor can finish you off.
Some may wonder is there's any safe cloaking method? There are some methods for specific purposes but they all imply risks. There are methods of masking cloaked content and make it look better at first sight but … none will survive a manual review.
I'll stop here. I'm tired, selfish and secretive and wanted to have a post about cloaking here myself :)
