fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Looking into cloaking as the most powerful technique of search engine positioning, people immediately tend to fret. “Won’t I get banned if caught out?” is the most common question put to our support staff. “And how can I avoid it?“ The irony being that this will probably be the least of your worries as an accomplished cloaker – because avoiding search engine penalties is really such a nobrainer!

But how much of an issue is it actually? Well, as so often in life it depends entirely on who you happen to ask. The search engine reps will obviously wag a warning index finger, claiming that they’ll happily excommunicate you (ok, your web site, really), threatening you with eternal Web damnation if they catch you cloaking. Awful prospects, hm? Only they don’t.

So let me qualify that: Yes, search engines are very much against webmasters displaying different content to search engine spiders than they have on offer for human visitors. And yes, if caught out doing it blatantly and in an obviously misleading manner, they’ll ban your site. However, doing so isn’t as easy and straightforward as it may appear at first glance.

To cut a long story short, it will typically require a human editor and a slew of specialized tools to determine beyond reasonable doubt whether any given web site is actually cloaking. So it’s labor intensive, i.e. costly, and more often than not they simply can’t be bothered. Hence, while the risk of incurring a penalty for cloaking is indeed quite real, it’s also extremely remote.

Basically, there’s two typical ways to cloak: by page and by site. The chief reason why we switched to cloaking entire dedicated web sites (what we at fantomaster.com term Shadow Domains™) rather than mixing cloaked and non-cloaked pages on the same web property, is security: If caught out, a Shadow Domain™ may get banned – but at least your Core Domain, i.e. where you redirect your human visitors to, will be safe.

Ok, here’s out take for worst case scenario buffs: So you’ve really managed to get your cloaked domain banned? Who cares – simply register a new one and start from scratch. Or, better yet, make that two or three or even ten fresh Shadow Domains™: After all, it’s a number game, and the more you can throw at it, the merrier…

However, not everyone will be appeased: “But what if the search engines penalize the target pages, i.e. my main web site I’m redirecting all those thousands of visitors to?” the chronic agonizers will demand to know.

Consider: Let’s say you point your Shadow Domain™ visitors to your affiliate link at Amazon – do you seriously believe that Amazon will get banned by Google for nefarious cloaking practices by one of their millions of affiliates? Fat chance. But seriously: If you actually believe this could happen, you’ll probably be better off without cloaking: No amount of success in search engine marketing can outweigh peace of mind and sound, healthy sleep, no matter to what extent it may be based on mere credulity…

But Amazon is a big player and you’re not, right? So maybe they’ll hit you, the “small guy”, nevertheless? Not very likely, but obviously there’s no guarantee it won’t happen, either. (Also, the search engines may change the rules of the game anytime without notice, as they’ve been known to do on many occasions in the past.)

So here’s what to do. Let us assume you have a wonderful web site selling wonderful gooey widgets: WonderfulGooeyWidgets.com. (At time of writing, the name’s still free, I checked. Any takers?) And it’s not ranking too well because basically your pages are built in Flash and Shockwave and loaded with Real videos to boot. (After all, you really want to shock and awe your visitors with the sheer unprecedented visual and audible gooeyness of your widgets, right?)

So you set up oodles of Shadow Domains™ (registered with the privacy or domain-by-proxy feature enabled to hide your tracks) which aren’t hampered by all that nifty multimedia stuff the search engine spiders are plain too dumb to make any sense of: all highly optimized text, text, text which the spiders will gobble up like crazy – it’s what they know, it’s what they love.

For good measure, you’ll spread them across several IP C class blocks and point a few good one-way links at them (e.g. from your blogs) to make them sticky in the Serps, and off you go. Seeing that you’ve set up plenty of SDs, you won’t be too surprised if, come indexing time, you’re suddenly dominating the search results for wonderful gooey widgets left, right and center. It’s just one of those things a smart cloaker will simply have to learn to live with…

Now because you’re seriously worried that some sneaky search engine editor might actually check out your SDs manually, instead of redirecting your droves of visitors to WonderfulGooeyWidgets.com, you (being even sneakier!) have simply cloned that cool site of yours and set up the copied version at BestWonderfulGooeyWidgets.com. Actually, you don’t even need a dedicated domain name for that – you could just as well implement it at IP 123.123.123.123 or similar.

Of course, you’ll also take care to keep the search engine spiders away from that clone of yours – you want to avoid any confusion (not to mention possible duplicate content penalties) by confronting them with two identical web sites. If you use the robots meta tag value “noindex, nofollow” and the robots.txt “Disallow” syntax for this, it should suffice nicely.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, here’s the code for the robots.txt file (which should be saved in your domain’s root directory (“DocumentRoot” in Linux speak):

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Assuming you’re particularly paranoid, you may also want to filter your traffic via a dedicated script to keep out the spiders, but that would really qualify for an overkill.

Now, the worst that could ever happen (and again: it’s an extremely remote possibility to begin with) is that the search engine editor checking you out would ban your SDs and, just maybe, that cloned site of yours, if at all. (Hey, they can’t very well deindex a site you’ve meticulously prevented from being indexed in the first place, right? Hah – cheeky stuff!) Your WonderfulGooeyWidgets.com domain would still be safe, and as long as you cover your tracks in terms of Whois domain ownership and contact data, you can sleep soundly from now on, merrily counting your money during day time like the nefarious black hat you are …

Subscribe Feed!