Search Engine Cloaking

[ambition2success]

I am struggling to get ranked in the top search engines, I have tried the link exchanges, search engine submissions, doorway pages, u name it, I still can't find myself besides typing my own domain. What is the trick? Someone told me about search engine cloaking and that a lot of top companies use it. I read some articles about it and, not to sure if it's legal or not?

Is it legal? Is it right? or do you list thousands of doorway pages and hopes you rank?

Just Curious on what some of you are doing?

[David Wallace]

None of the above, actually.

Link exchanges may help if you are getting links from relevant and quality sites.

No need to submit to search engines.

Doorways pages aren't going to help you.

Cloaking can get you into big trouble.

Best thing to do is first of all make sure you have the very best site related to your industry. Make sure it has great content in which your keywords are represented. make sure you optimize the title tag of each page of your site. Build your link popularity by getting quality sites to link to you. This can happen naturally if you have a great site but you can also help it along by seeking link partners as well.

[ambition2success]

Thanks David. I have an affiliate storefront, so wouldnt' that qualify for a lot of keywords? Does search engines drop your listing if you have to many? What qualifies you to have more keywords versus very little from the top companies listed in the search engines?

I've read so many articles stating what can help you rank. I've tried so many different techniques, non seems to be working. Currently i am trying the link exchange, I've also read, if you have duplicate sites that will disqualify you, is that true? ie. list some of your web content on the free hosting webspace from the search engines.


I have SEO Watch RSS feed on my site and read daily, that's how I found out about this forum. I've read rss feeds can help boost also.

Any suggestions?

[David Wallace]

...I have an affiliate storefront...
That's probably your problem right there. Affiliate sites do not do well as far as search engine positioning goes because well, ... there are many, many duplicate versions of them on the Internet. I know human edited directories hate them and I imagine search engines aren't too fond of them either.

[Terry Plank]

David is giving good advise here.

If you haven't studied them already, the Guidelines at Google and Yahoo! are quite helpful on what they like and don't like.

Google says:
"Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects."

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/ranking/index.html
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/index.html

Keep reading throughout the forums and you'll find excellent information here. Also, you may want to check some of the other forums shown in the box at the end of the page: Forum Roll.

[Incubator]

Cloaking will always be an issue with the main SE's across the board. If you are in an area that is competitive you may find many of your competitors using it.
Cloaking, like email can be used as spam unless... you are the NRP telling google you will be using it since all your content may be in another format, IE NRP using it to enable audio files to be picked up. The real problem, lies within the search engines either allowing it or not, for some its, ok but not others.
I am not a fan of cloaking but i can see why (professionally) it is used. Risk management will then enter the playing field to ensure you have a secondary plan incase you are banded from the major search engines.
As for as "ethics " go, I personally dont believe you can enforce "ethical SEO" until all the playing field is fair to begin with and I dont think we will see that until all the rules apply to everyone

Regards

Wayne

[seomike]

Cloaking is safe as long as it doesn't get broken. There are plenty of affiliates that cloak because it makes them look more unique and non affiliated. You'll hear all sorts of hoopla about cloaking. Just know this. I've seen many cloaks in Google never get caught and have page ranks of 5 and 6 with people linking to it, people including seo's LOL. I'd advise not to do it because there is an easier way to solve your problem. Plus generating spider food pages for the first time might take you a month. The things that triggers the alarms for an affiliate site are 1. duplicate content 2. the outbound links with affiliate id stuff in the string.

Solving problem 1 is easy just mix your content up enough that it doesn't match anyone else. whether you scramble it by switch paragraphs around or you add a paragraph to it. It doesn't take much changing at all to keep a duplication penalty from accruing.

Solving problem 2 is a little more tricky. Instead of linking straight to your affiliate you want to make the bots think that you are linking actually to the product in your site. So for example here is my amazon affiliate link that sets off the alarms.

amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1883283094/ref=ase_livestockdire-20/102-8161088-0367353?v=glance&s=books

this is how I solved the problem. you trim you link down to just the product ID in this case it would be 1883283094 that is what tells amazon what product to display. instead of the above as a link you change it to /buy-1883283094.html or what ever url you want as long as the product id is in it. Now it looks like your linking to a product in your site. Now what we do is make a .php page called redirect.php and we add this in it

<?

if(isset($dir)){
//diferent affiliates will have different ways of linking to them.
header("Location: http://www.amazon.comexec/obidos/tg/detail/-/$dir/ref=ase_livestockdire-20/102-8161088-0367353?v=glance&s=books");
}else{
header("Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/");
}

?>

then we add this mod rewrite to the .htaccess file if you host on apache

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/buy-[0-9]+\.html$
RewriteRule ^buy-([0-9]+)\.html$^/redirect.php?dir=$1 [L]

and we're done. now change all your links to buy-####.html and user and bot will think they are going to a page in your site but the modrewrite will kick in and redirect them to your affiliate. Good luck and hope this helps

[seomike]

I am not a fan of cloaking but i can see why (professionally) it is used. Risk management will then enter the playing field to ensure you have a secondary plan incase you are banded from the major search engines.

Risk management is only a factor if you are dumb enough or have enough cohonies to cloak the core site. Google or any other engine can't do crap to a 3rd party domain that is a cloaked redirect to the core. They can ban the 3rd party cloak but can't touch the core. If that were the case amazon, commission junction partners or any affiliate program for that matter would be eliminated from the Search engines.

[Incubator]

I agree, that train of though is very visible within competitive industries such as Online casinos, porn, pharma....etc. That's where you will see lots of other domains set up using agressive marketing tactics.
Yahoo has already made a statement that certain affiliate sites will start to be drop and leaders in the industries mentioned above, are starting to turn towards taking back thier online marketing styles across the SE's


Wayne

[seomike]

Actually Yahoo will accept a cloaked domain in their sitematch system because they know it will rank and make them money LOL.

Now if they start dropping affiliates, all the more reason to use what I just posted above. We've been the top affiliate for a bodybuilding suppliment supplier for months now. It works. On some terms we even out rank the main site LOL. Might pick up their SEO contract cause of that :D

[Incubator]

HAHAHAHAH, totally agree.......... Yahoo's the only one making real money in that area of a deal with advertisers

[seomike]

This is if you can wait a month or 2 to get picked up you don't need to go into the sitematch system.

[Incubator]

Congrats on the Pharma program, you will probally end up with the contract, I have seen that happen many times since they have tracked your conversions :)

Pharma in Canada is alot stricter laws by PAAB here, they force advertisers basically to say the product name and thats it........ thus we get all spam Viagra emails in from the USA....

Wayne