Confessions of a Brisbane search engine link cloaker

Link cloaking is where search engines are given different pages to index than are available to web surfers. Server software detects that a search engine is visiting a particular web page and shows the search engine spider different text and keywords to what would be normally seen.

Many so-called, Black Hat SEO companies use link cloaking to give their clients a competitive advantage when it comes to search engine rankings.

As part of my SEO education and experimentation I purchased some link cloaking software. I have installed it on one of the sites I manage and I must say it works pretty well. I won't tell you which site in case someone tells on me and I get banned by the major search engines.

I suspect the reason it does work so well in terms of generating traffic and leads is that I have loaded it with a lot of very industry specific keywords and word combinations. I find part numbers and industry jargon words work very well.

These keywords are usually in the real web site, but what the link cloaking software does is improve the keyword density by generating hundreds of pages with different keyword combinations and put the keywords in the title tags of those pages.

What tends to happen is the visitor clicks on the link in the search engine results page (SERP), goes to the web site, doesn't see what they were searching for immediately, but then uses the search facility within the web site to find the right pages.

I've been running the cloaker software for over 9 months now and am getting better and better results. I've also noticed that the search engines seem to lap it up and increase the frequency of their visits, possibly because the content is always changing.

Yes, most of the pages are in Google's supplemental index. I really don't care because even those supplemental pages generate clicks, visits and sales.

A lot of SEO's frown on link cloaking and pretend it is unethical. Te reality is that Google supports link cloaking type behaviour through it's Adwords revenue stream.

With Adwords, it doesn't matter about the relevancy of the linked page in the ad, if you are prepared to stump up the cash to purchase some keywords you can send clickers to any page you want.

If Google was serious about the ethics of link cloaking, they would make sure the landing page from an Adwords page was relevant to the search terms. Ever noticed that ebay seems to be selling exactly what you want and when you click on the ad there's nothing relevant?

White Hat, Black Hat, Grey Hat? Link cloaking does work and it's a risk I'm prepared to take.