When should I use cloaking?

There are many good and bad ways to use cloaking. Google says there are ways where they approve on its use and they even say a good way to identify the Googlebot is by doing an IP lookup and checking if it is in the googlebot.com domain.

When should you cloak?


Cloaking javascript and CSS
Cloaking to get your competitors links
First some basic questions answered:

What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is showing a search engine other content then normal visitors.

What does Google find plausible reasons to cloak?
When you have a website that is hard to index by a script, you can have an alternative version with the same content available.
Or when you have a password protected area you want Google to index, you can let him in without a password. Just add “noarchive” to your robots metatag, otherwise people just look at the Google cache.
There are more reasons, but the rule is: “If it improves the searchbot crawlability of the same content a user sees”.

Why should I cloak?
Normally you shouldn’t! Make good sites with good code and both users and Google should see the same. If your code is unfriendly for search engines, rewrite the code and don’t cloak.

There are situations where you want to draw a users attention to one place and Googles attention to another. Normally I’d use images to draw a users attention to my “call to action” and headers to draw Googles attention to the most important text. So in most situations you don’t need cloaking for this.

If you’re a good boy, don’t use cloaking! If you’re a bad boy (or girl), do it!

But there are good spammy tactics?
Of course there are many fun ways to use cloaking to your advantage. Most of the time you wan’t both linkable content and search engine friendly content. This could become a compromise and you should always want the best of both. Here are some fun tactics with cloaking.

I hope Matt Cutts doesn’t read this post because there are ways to detect the following tactics in an algorithm, they just don’t detect them yet. My blog is too small to be detected by Matt Cutts (the Google spamcop), but when he does: “Matt please leave a comment!”

Javascript and Stylesheet tactics
With external javascript and stylesheets you can change the appearance and visibility of your content. Google sees this and devalues hidden content.

I tried to disalow my .JS and .CSS files from being indexed in the robots.txt, but Google disobeys this and still reads them. Then I tried IP cloaking (detecting if an IP belonged to a search engine and showed different javascript and stylesheet information) and it worked.

You can hide a block of content, you can show an H1 header as normal inline text, you can hide links and much more all by the use of javascript or css. Currently the detection of cloaking isn’t very sophisticated and algorithmicly not many spammers are caught. When you get caught on cloaking it is mostly because someone ratted on you to Google. If you just cloak the .JS and .CSS files people don’t see any difference between the search engine cache and normal file. The cached version still uses the users version of external files.

Cloaking for linkbuilding
This way is more dangerous because people can detect it more easily and tell Google about it. But many people ask me: “How do I get links from my competitors to my commercial website?” Here is a possible answer to this question!




Make a non-commercial website about a subject your competitors might be willing to link to and point them to it. Don’t let it have any link to you or your commercial activities.
For instance: Results of the top 5 SEO companies competition website.
Email: Congratulations you made 1st place!
Result: They will proudly link to it.

When they start linking you want to divert the linklove to your commercial activities without loosing the links.

Either cloak and place good links to your commercial website or use a 301-redirect to divert all linkpoints.
The 301 redirect shows no cache in Google, thus no trackback to where it is going.
Competitors just don’t see it show up in Google. From their IP the domain shows the normal site, so no reason not to link to it.

The links will remain and could even grow, but the love is diverted!