Cloaking 101

A few questions about getting started up with cloaking

[jdancing]

I think I have read just about every cloaking message on this board going back at least 3 or 4 months. I have decided to use IP cloaking with a commercial product such as Traffic Delivery. However, I still have some fairly basic questions before taking the plunge.

Let say my site is www.mydomain.com and I have pages selling different products like www.mydomain.com/widgit1 , www.mydomain.com/widgit2 , www.mydomain.com/widgit3 etc…

This site has been submitted to all the search engines including directories Yahoo and DMOZ with poor results. I use lots of layers, ASP, and JavaScript so other than total redesign no one will ever find me in the very competitive Widget market. So I turn to cloaking to serve up spider friendly pages.

Here are my IP cloaking questions:

1) Do I need to set up a separate domain page for each of my spider friendly pages like (“WWW.myfakedomain\widget1” and “www.myfakedomain\widget2” and www.myfakedomain\widget3) and then have these pages redirect web surfers to the proper page on the mydomain.com domain?

2) Or does IP cloaking use the current “www.mydomain.com” web pages and somehow server two different versions of each widget page. One optimized for the spiders and one for the surfers?

3) Would it be wise to create a complete duplicate of my site at a new domain to use for cloaking and leave my current site uncloaked?

Thanks,

jdancing

[Damian]

1) Do I need to set up a separate domain page for each of my spider friendly pages like (“WWW.myfakedomain\widget1” and “www.myfakedomain\widget2” and www.myfakedomain\widget3) and then have these pages redirect web surfers to the proper page on the mydomain.com domain?

No need

2) Or does IP cloaking use the current “www.mydomain.com” web pages and somehow server two different versions of each widget page. One optimized for the spiders and one for the surfers?

The short answer: Yes.

3) Would it be wise to create a complete duplicate of my site at a new domain to use for cloaking and leave my current site uncloaked?

Don't think so. If you want to lower the risk of getting penalised with your main domain for cloaking you can do the cloaking project on a second domain but then I suggest not to use an exact duplicate. As soon as you miss one bot (it happens when they start coming from 'new' ip'addresses) it'll be served the default page..the one a regular visitor would see and then you have two identical domains in a search engine's index of which one is bound to be dropped.

[johnhamman]

Consider getting another Ip address also with the new domain name for safety.
john

[jdancing]

I am baffled as to how the same page, www.mydomain.com/widgit2 for example, could serve up 2 different pages. My guess is that the CGI script generates two separate pages on the fly?

I read this at the Kloakit website:
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"… most of these so-called "stealth" scripts are actually detectable by the search engines. You see, search engines refuse to index CGI-generated pages. If they think they are being sent to a different page than was submitted, then *boink*, they stop right there!"
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Should I be concerned? Or do are the good scripts able to get around this issue?

Also, its sounds more risky to have a second "cloak only" duplicate website…

BTW: thanks for the quick responses!

jdancing

[Damian]

Newbie Cloaking Primer [webmasterworld.com] explains the basic concept of cloaking.

Should I be concerned?

No. Sounds like they are just trying to sell you something by trying to scare you. If you do it properly there is no way for a search engine to tell a page is CGI generated. A page being CGI generated has nothing to do with the page being cloaked by definition, so it doesn't make any sense anyway.

[jdancing]

Great link. Thanks.

[volatilegx]

Cloaking from a separate domain is meant to separate the risks associated with cloaking and creating "entrance pages" from your primary website. Duplicating content is probably not a good idea. Also, I would specify the page you show to humans not be the home page of your primary domain... possibly it could be a page on your primary domain which is disallowed in robots.txt...