Okay, so I know that anything to do with cloaking is contraversial, but I am curious about link cloaking.

By link cloaking, I specifically mean, pages that provide backlinks via include files (or whatever) that utilize UA or IP detection technologies etc. to show the outgoing links for se spiders and show nothing for regular visitors.

The reason this would be done is to allow the site providing backlinks to not diminish the sites integrity to visitors while it would still receive financial benefits from selling the backlinks.

I think this is being done more often than people think and was wondering if anyone here has also seen evidence of this or what your thoughts are on this cloaking niche?

I cloak internal links within my own site to help concentrate the PageRank on the most important pages of my site.

Check out the details here;

Deleted Link


Regards all,

Doug

That link doesnt say anything about the details of how to cloak links, its just advertising your affiliate ebooks. Not Cool!

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I was a little disappointed too when I visited the site

Are you saying that web surfers will not see the backlinks but search engines will see the links?

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Yes, that is the idea behind link cloaking...

I would say that most if not all of the major SEs either directly say not to use cloaking, or indicate that you should not show anything to the spider that is in any way different from what the visitor sees.

I did play with cloaking when it was first coming on the scene (ahem, on a test non-comercial site) and was able to do some neat things in testing/playing.

But, there is no way I would do it today if I was concerned at all about the site. Cloaking is just too easy to detect, and even if it is not for a devious reason, you could end up banned just the same.

Just my $.02 worth (actually $.0013 with the current devaluation of the dollar), if you deicde to do it, let us know how it turns out, and good luck.

- Robert