Link cloaking

I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of link cloaking scripts. This was a simple breakdown...useful for those just learning, like myself.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007...-cloaking.html

Do any of the web guru's have anything to add? Specifically in regards to the difference in link cloaking software/scripts (or is the "software" just a fancy way of someone deciding to monetize a script?) and frame breakers.

Please correct me if I have misunderstood this, but a frame breaker blocks a redirect/affiliate link from being recognized upon returning to a specific url? And this is a script that runs at a set destination, correct?

I started my online business "career" doing blackhat crap like this...but soon learned that being in an arms race with Google was not a business model that I enjoyed.

Can't see why anyone would need this type of technology, you'll get a short term benefit and then Google will sniff it out and your site will be banned. Why not just build quality stuff that people will enjoy and actually benefit from visiting?

I didn't think it was just for that. I thought that particular technique would enable you to publish hyperlinks in your ebooks and that would stay active. At least, that was my interest.

In that, I mean once you release an ebook with hyperlinks in it, after a year or so what if servers/destinations change, can't you just modify the redirect in your hosting account with a script like that? That way, you don't shaft your customers that bought your ebook?
The hyperlinks stay the same, but you can change the destination on the fly.

Maybe I've got it wrong? And what do you mean blackhat crap like this? Do you mean trying to cover up your affiliate link? Please elaborate.

I think what Jonleehacker was referring to is that link cloaking (or just "cloaking") is generally used to game SEO search rankings by redirecting users and bots to different pages (from the same link).

For example, you have a site called "StuffedAnimals.com". This site is designed so that when a search engine bot hits it, it feeds the bot a page that has lots of porn links. But, when users hit the site, it's actually a storefront for stuffed animals.

In this way, the search engines associate all the keywords on the porn site with that domain (StuffedAnimals.com), and it gets ranked high for porn searches. Users who search for porn come across this site, click on it, but instead of seeing porn, they instead see the storefront. Voila, the owner of the site can now get lots of extra traffic from people looking for porn.

Sorry, not a great example...but the first thing I thought of...

Essentially, the site has convinced the search engines that it's one thing, while in actuality the user sees something different.

Using "illegal" tricks (illegal to the search engines, that is) is often referred to as "blackhat SEO"...

No, your example worked great, thank you! some speed

Although I don't understand the point, I get it a little more. Wouldn't you want to expose your site to people who are in your target market, not people searching for porn or other? The sole purpose I guess is to rank higher, but the outcome may not be improved I guess.

If I had picked a better example, it might be clearer...

As an example, let's say MJ really wanted to attract a whole lot more real estate investors to this site. Currently, a reasonable portion of the site is geared towards real estate, but if a bot crawled this site, it wouldn't rank it very high for real estate keywords (the site isn't specific enough about real estate).

So, MJ could cloak the site, and serve pages to the bots that were 100% filled with keywords related to real estate. This would get the site ranked high for real estate keyword searches, even though this probably wouldn't be the first choice of sites those people were looking for (though it should be! )...

Don't think of it necessarily as trying to fool the bot into thinking a one site is another site (like my bad first example), but instead to trying to fool the bot into thinking it's more specialized around certain keywords than it really is.

Does that make more sense?

Not much really to add here, everyone has got it pretty well covered. Its a technique that I would not recommend as getting your site banned in Google is not worth it. Keyword stuffing w/the same color as your background for example was once very popular and I still see it today. Black hat stuff gets you banned and if Google doesn't find it, your competitor will ... and then they inform Google.

The article is also more than a year old; in search engine strategy, that might as well be 2 decades.

Sorry to come down a bit hard on your post mtnman. I assumed you realized that the technique was "black hat" but from reading your replies, I think now you are just wanting to "redirect" your affiliate links.

The "cloaking" referred to in the article is, as JScott mentioned, an attempt to deceive search engine spiders, but redirects are actually a very wise affiliate marketing tool.

It is pretty much proven that a link like this:

http://www.mysite.com/go/tool

will get more clicks than:

http://www.toolsite.com/blah/somecra...kjnadd032308y1

so converting the link with a 301 redirect makes a lot of sense. Also if you distribute the link and you want to repoint it (say toolsite.com goes belly up) then you can just change the redirect.

I sometimes even take this another step and buy a dedicated domain name for my redirect. Here's an article I wrote on the topic where my affiliate link (doesn't even have a webpage, it's just a redirect) is ranking #1 on Yahoo:

Killer Example of a Domain Name as Affiliate Redirect

And a couple more articles on that topic:

Why I Use Domain Redirects as Affiliate Links

7 Reasons to Use Domains for Affiliate Links

Just to add to the confusion there is a type of affiliate redirect that is actually called "cloaking" but is not a blackhat technique.

This involves using an html "frame" and what happens is if we take my example from above everything would be the same except that when the visitor clicks the link and goes to:

http://www.toolsite.com/blah/somecra...kjnadd032308y1

in the address bar of the browser it will still say:

http://www.mysite.com/go/tool

or http://www.myaffiliateredirect.com/ if you use a dedicated domain. This can be pretty effective, since some people will even grab the address and link to your cloaked URL.

Hope this helps,

Jon

Thanks for the more detailed explanation. A get what you meant now...kind of my fault, as I didn't explain my intent properly because I didn't understand. Thanks! +speed