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This post begins with two quotes, further explained below:

In September 2007, Ralph Tegtmeier & Ed Purkiss coined the term “Mosaic Cloaking” whereby dynamic pages are constructed as tiles of content and only portions of the pages, javascript and CSS are changed, simultaneously decreasing the contrast between the cloaked page and the “friendly” page while increasing the capability for targeted delivery of content to various spiders and human visitors.

[Ref.: Wikipedia: Cloaking]

And:

I am posting this here and now, because I want to set the record straight before anyone else goes off and tries to poach the term. I’ve been talking about mosaic cloaking in the abstract for a while, but the term was actually coined by the Fantomaster himself in September of 2007 when we were having a discussion about it at the Syndk8.

Mosaic Cloaking is essentially componentized IP-Delivery. In other words, you do not cloak the whole page, you cloak portions of it dynamically. In the simplest example, you have a page where you have a blank space. Based on the IP address of the inbound surfer, you may provide keyword rich text, or Adsense, or an affiliate ad – based on the IP address of the surfer. If you do not want Google, for example, to see that you are affiliating for then you might push the code for AdSense out if you sense that it is a Google spider – otherwise you send the affiliate ad.

More interesting mosaic cloaking is sending different javascript, CSS files, or even slightly different components of each that might be used to enhance the “experience” of the surfer, be it a search engine spider or human. Using comments and other tricks, your source files could be exactly the same byte-size as cloaked files, look the same, and only be available in the “spider version” if they came from a validated IP address. It would be extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what was happening, if you were trying to reverse engineer someone’s SEO strategy. Combine that with Google’s Multivariate Testing notions (ie., sending different pages to regular surfers under the guise of market testing) and you have a cloak that is extraordinarily difficult to pierce.

The best mosaics are a combination of surfer experience abstraction, with differing chunks of obfuscated Javascript that has been byte-size balanced, differing CSS external files and IP delivered from the same place dynamically based on a proven spider database such as the Fantomas spiderSpy product.

[Ref: Mosaic Cloaking: An Explanation]

Also, please see Ed’s short forum piece here:

Mosaic Cloaking: An Explanation

Indeed, setting the records straight lest someone out there attempts to hijack the term, is what this is mainly about. That, and a friendly heads up by way of a Season’s gift to our esteemed readers, offering a sneak peak behind the scenes of what’s brewing in the sinister clandestine developer labs of modern bad ass Black Hat SEO.

When Ed and I commenced our discussion on Syndk8 forum (registration required) back in September this year, it was he who came up with the basic concept. Being the language junkie I am, I promptly tagged it Mosaic Cloaking™.

And in case anyone’s wondering: Yes, it’s a protected trademark by usage and publication now – held collectively by both Ed’s and my company: “let it be known by all men” and all that… In view of the fact that even a multi billion dollar corporation such as “Do-No-Evil” Google didn’t shy away from stealing our trademarked term Shadow Domain™ to the point of abusing it in their Webmaster Guidelines for years (removed now), we feel this to be a direly necessary step to protect our intellectual property rights.

On a more practical level, chances are you’ll probably want to know more hands on details about Mosaic Cloaking™. Well, this much we can divulge at the present point: It’s still being researched into, developed and tested over a broad spectrum of web sites. No verified metrics we would care to publish yet, but rest assured that you’ll read it here (and on Ed’s blog as well as his forum) first.

Needless to say, it’s a highly sophisticated and fairly complex technology that will enable black hat SEOs to truly push the envelope in terms of well nigh undetectable cloaking/IP delivery to an unprecedented degree of efficiency. It will also effectively dissolve the hitherto clear cut borders between cloaked and non-cloaked pages – Web 3.0 at its very best!

So will it help us make more friends at Google, Yahoo!, Live or Ask headquarters? Probably not. But guess what: We’ve finally resigned ourselves to the fact that we’ll simply have to live with that. Laughing all the way to the bank…

The fantomaster team wishes all our readers a ripping good holiday season and a happy, successful New Year!

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