I always thought cloaking used a rifle where we had to use a shotgun but it seems it's far from that, with a leading exponent suggesting 150 domains at 50,000 pages a pop being ideal for a competitive term.

Apart from the short time involved in generating these pages, it doesn't seem a particularly effective methodology, IMO.

The really good aggressive boys will target the main keywords but from what I've learned cloaks are best for fringe words not for main keywords.


If you have 200 keywords you use your best ones on the core site lets say the top 50. Then you throw the rest into a cloak and bam you're done. You don't have to make useless keyword pages that look like crap to clutter up your core site. You do that nonesense on a safely anonymous 3rd party site.

It sounds like one of those gray-area things that search engines don't like, and that could eventually come back later to haunt a company. Search engines could potentially begin tracking that sort of stuff, then blacklisting websites that use seemingly-anonymous third-party sites to grab more traffic - after all, is anything done on the Internet truly 100% anonymous?

Search engines could potentially begin tracking that sort of stuff, then blacklisting websites that use seemingly-anonymous third-party sites to grab more traffic - after all, is anything done on the Internet truly 100% anonymous?

Can you control how a 3rd party links or redirects to you? NOPE. We could get fantom to set up a cloak to your site and the engines couldn't do a thing about it. Otherwise you could wipe your competition with these seemingly-anonymous third-party sites... That's the loop hole that allows the cloaker boys to do what they do.

I obviously had little idea what cloaking actually consisted of ;-)

If I'd realised it was just machine generated rubbish on an industrial scale, I wouldn't have been quite so impressed by those who practiced it.....