Newbie Cloaker

well versed in PHP, Perl etc. Where do I start coding?

[NecEvil]

Hey guys,
Have been designing and programming on the web for quite some time now. Over that time I have run into quite a few competitors sites that have been cloaked to attain good search engine rankings, while having highly graphically intense visually pleasing pages.

Up until this point I have had no need to cloak in any way, shape, or form. But there is just no way around it this time, as far as I can see. And I am also curious to if, and if it does, how well, cloaking really does work.

Like I said I know PHP, Perl etc so theoretically I should be able to do it. I learn best from code examples so if anyone knows where I could pick some up that would be great.

Thanks for your help, you guys have a great thing going here.

-Scott-

[NecEvil]

From what I have seen I am looking to get into IP Cloaking.

[Nick_W]

Well, you'll be glad to know it's pretty simple: Here's a PHP function I used to 'ban' IP's from a clients site:

function is_banned() {
 $blist=file('/path/to/text/list/of-ips.txt');
 $remote=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
 $b=0;
 foreach($blist as $key => $val) {
 $ip=trim($val);
 if(preg_match("/$ip/", $remote)) {
  $b++;
 }
 }
 if($b!=0) {
 return TRUE;
 } else return FALSE;
}

Nick

[MrSpeed]

>> And I am also curious to if, and if it does, how well, cloaking really does work.

Really well until you start ranking high for competitive keywords and you get turned in.

Cloaking scripts much like toplist scripts and traffic trading scripts have matured a lot over the past few years. Today's cloaking scripts have a lot of features to not only cloak but to generate random keyword text, links etc. As you can see form the posted code these scripts aren't the hardest things in the world to write. What is hard is keeping up with all the spiders, IP's etc...

[NecEvil]

Hey again,
Thanks to all of those that got me started a few days back.

I am just starting to cloak a test page on one of my alternate domains. My questions are as follows:

1. Which engines are most vulnerable to cloaking? ie: Low Risk of being found out.

2. Given the above question, which engines are highest risk, and should NOT be cloaked?

I am also interested in if anyone is succesfully cloaking google, and if so, how they are doing it without getting busted by the cache etc.

[NecEvil]

Another after the post thought,
If you have been cought, how did you get busted, and on which search engine were you working.

[SEO practioner]

NecEvil

OH- dear! Look, ask ANYBODY here and they will ALL tell you that cloaking is a BIG nono and against the TOS of just about all SE's, ESPECIALLY Google!

:-( Why Cloak? Why not do like all the rest of us by carefully optimizing your site as you should?

Cloaking will only get your site banned and put on the "black list"

I know cloaking used to be done a lot in the past and this is THE reason why it is prohibited today.

I hope I have succeeded in talking you out of it

SEO

[DaveAtIFG]

ask ANYBODY here and they will ALL tell you that cloaking is a BIG nono

I think you need to read some more in this forum although

against the TOS of just about all SE's

Few here will disagree with THAT statement.

Successfully cloaking is a lot of work! IMHO, Google, Ink, and Fast/AllTheWeb are the only engines providing enough traffic to warrent the effort.

Google is presently the toughest to cloak for two reasons:
1. The cache
2. The competition (if your competitors even suspect cloaking, they may report you and Goog appears to be getting fairly aggressive against cloaking)

For an SE, it's child's play to "bust a cloak." They simply need to visit a page disguised as a surfer and compare the page they get with what their spider gets. But it's also pretty resource hungry. Ink actually did this a few years ago on all of the sites they had indexed and published statistics about what they found. They buried (but didn't ban) cloaked pages they found. Presently, they don't seem to care if you cloak.

Cloaking is about flying under the radar. Four major rules:
1. Don't get ranked for an unrelated keyword! Getting a number 1 ranking for "Harry Potter" and sending visitors to an ad*lt site will get you banned in no time. This is the biggest reason cloaking got a bad name and the stigma continues...
2. Don't permit a cloaked page to be cached.
3. If an SE uses title, keywords, or description metas in their SERPs, keep the human page and the cloaked page "synchronized" in those areas to foil competitors.
4. In case you missed it, Don't get ranked for an unrelated keyword!

[volatilegx]

What Dave said...

and my opinion is to cloak for all the major engines but Google. I get excellent results from cloaking campaigns on Inktomi and AskJeeves/Teoma.

If you do decide to cloak for Google, make sure the optimized versions of the cloaked pages are fairly similar to the regular versions. Also, Google allows you to disallow pages from being cached by using this meta tag: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> Be aware that using this meta tag could put you on a list of suspected cloakers... it's your call.