Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 1 - An introduction)

I love cloaking! I think it’s brilliant. I love the fact I can create the perfect user experience whilst also presenting a perfectly optimised page to the search engines. That’s right, cloaking isn’t evil or immoral (at least it isn’t when done correctly) it can really help the user to find what they want.

Now, there is a grey area when defining cloaking. For instance; is “display:none” cloaking? To me it isn’t. Cloaking to me is delivering a page to a search engine where the source code is different from the page you deliver to the user.

A simple cloak

First we are going to start with a really simple form of cloaking - user-agent cloaking. So, we are going to need user-agents for the 3 major engines. So here they are:

  • Google: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
  • Yahoo: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
  • MSN/Live: msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Those are the main useragents for the three engines. They do use other variations, but I’m not going to go into detail with these. Lets knock up a script to do some user-agent cloaking.

< ?php
// First we need to collect the visitors user-agent
$visitorUserAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
// Next we need to check the user-agent for occurrences
// of the words google or yahoo or msn
if(stristr($visitorUserAgent, 'google')
|| stristr($visitorUserAgent, 'yahoo')
|| stristr($visitorUserAgent, 'msn'))
{
// Now show the bot the page need to see
echo 'super, dooper, ultra optimised page';
}else{
// And show the user the bog standard web page
echo 'standard user page';
}
?>

So I can makez a pages rankz for ‘bowling balls’ but shows the user Viagrazzz?!!1!!1one!1!!!?

Sure if you really want to. But why oh why would you want to do that? That is an example of crap cloaking. If a user is looking for bowling balls that is what he wants; he doesn’t want some of your blue pills. I will go into more detail with regards to targeting later in the guide.

So that is the end of part one. It may be a bit thin on content for many, but it was only suppose to be an introduction to the world of cloaking. There are much more exciting things coming like how to trick them there pesky manual review monkeys.

In part two we will explore how to make…

…A stronger cloak

Filed under: Just plain old SEO, echo 'Programming'; by Ryan

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