Cloaking

Generally speaking, cloaking is the name of the technique, which is usually used in order to deliver the content on some web pages to a search engine. To continue, the content should be delivered in such a way that different content than what is delivered to a regular internet user appears on the search engine. As a result, the main goal of cloaking is to boost search engine rank of a particular site on certain keywords. Also keep in mind that in cloaking, the search engine and the user are actually not on the same page. For that reason, both the user and the search engine are being deceived. By the way, the technique is also known as stealth.

As it has already been said, this technique guides an Internet user to various online projects that are related to something that this person expected to see by disguising the real content of such websites. Don’t you think that it sounds a little bit complicated?

For these simple reasons, let’s figure out how cloaking works. To begin with, a browser and a search engine spider are presented with various content for the same online page during the process of cloaking. In a word, the information from IP address or HTML header just supports showing the wrong online pages. In this case, a person will be forwarded to the website that includes some information that they simply were not looking for. To illustrate, let’s imagine that you are a searcher, who would like to know more about Stephen King but suddenly enter someone’s cooking related online project or even a pornographic website.

All in all, the directories of a website offer up their share of this technique as well.

I know that definitely doesn't sound like an inspiring perspective, but here is a good fact for you: these days there are a lot of the huge search engine companies that just oppose the cloaking technique, as it not only misinform the web audience but also doesn’t comply with the companies’ policy and standards. Talking about the SEO (search engine optimization) industry, the subject of this post is called a black hat technique, which (while used) is actually frowned on by all the most legitimate SEO companies as well as by all the famous web publishers. That is why now if you were got caught with cloaking, the results of such disinformation will show you the great penalties from the search engines. What is more, you will be removed from the index on the whole. In the end, think twice about using cloaking for your online project! All in all, keep in mind that the pluses of cloaking are not as impressing as its backwash.

Ok, now you know the general definition of cloaking technique, so it is time to see how it actually looks like. For example, you would like to cloak your affiliate link in order to make the management of your blog easier and simply get more traffic. So what is the basic process of cloaking an affiliate link? To make a long story short, it is quite simple. First of all, one needs to create a new folder (let it be ‘/out/’) from where they are going to serve their redirects. Secondly, open your robots.txt file and block this folder by adding the next command: ‘Disallow: /out/’. Finally, don’t forget to use a script in your redirect folder in order to redirect to some of your affiliate links.

For today it was all the main information about cloaking but I know that it is always better to know more, so I made a list of cool articles that you should definitely check in case you want to know more about the subject of this post. Thus, don’t miss the next pages: what is cloaking, how to cloak your affiliate links, about cloaking, SEO friendly CSS hiding, 50 working tips for successful affiliate selling and how to cloak affiliate links.

To sum everything up, don’t hesitate to leave all your thoughts and questions in the comments below this post. What is more, I would like you to tell me your own definition of cloaking! Maybe you have something to add or something to ask? For this simple reasons, just leave your comment below!

Finally, it’s time to learn other terms that are related to cloaking!

Related terms: SEO, Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web, web browser.

References and further reading:

• SEO (Search Engines Optimization) is the name of the process that makes some websites or some web pages visible in the web search engine’s unpaid results.
• World Wide Web(WOW) is a network of online content that is formatted in HTML and accessed via HTTP. Basically, this term refers to all the interlinked HTML pages that can be accessed over the Internet. By the way, the World Wide Web was originally designed in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee while he was a contractor at CERN. Needless to say, today World Wide Web is most often referred to simply as "the Web."
• Tim Berners-Lee (also known as TimBL) is a famous English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Historically, this person made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November 1989.
• A webhttps://www.templatemonsterdev.com/test-gggg/ browser is the name of the software program that allows a web user to locate, access, and display different web pages. As you may know, these days in common usage a web browser is usually shortened to "browser." Talking about their main functions, browsers are used primarily for displaying and accessing websites on the Internet, as well as other content created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML), etc.