You must be Cloaking

by Werner deBruin

Recently ‘Marketing Pilgrim’ writer Jeremy Luebke posted an article -“The art of Link Cloaking”.
He made quite a few interesting comments about the benefits of link cloaking; where some are true, and others are not. (In my opinion, anyway)

The origin of Link Cloaking
Link Cloaking was originally used by Affiliate marketers to ensure that their affiliate ID is present when you click on a link. For instance – having a link: http:/www.domain.co.za/product.php?id=146233ZA, you might stand the risk of someone just copying the URL and going there directly, thus not giving you the credit for the sale.
Enter Link Cloaking… Marketers will then rather use http://www.mywebaffiliatesite.co.za as the link, which will redirect (using a 301 redirect) to http:/www.domain.co.za/product.php?id=146233ZA

So how can we use this information in our SEO campaign? These were some suggestions according to Jeremy:

Take into account websites A, B, and C.

•    Website A : This will reflect to a site where you would like to link from
•    Website B : Your main site
•    Website C : This would be your “dummy” site using a 301 to redirect to B

1.    If in some situation your website (B) gets blacklisted, then it would be quite simple and quick to carry over all your current link power over to a new domain.
Will be handy to some Black Hat SEO’s out there. But how long until Google cracks down on that?

2.    Using the above method, you can actually hide your link profile form competitors. For instance: If you link from website A to C, and do the link profile for site B, it won’t show the link from A.

This is extremely cool, and it takes me back to my childhood fantasies of being a spy. But alas – this is impossible. I’ll explain why…
We have two domain names ‘Quirk.biz’ and ‘Quirk.co.za’. Currently, there is a permanent 301 redirect setup for Quirk.co.za to Quirk.biz

I did a link profile on the Quirk.biz website and found the following:
•    We currently have about 280 inbound links according to Google
•    Out of those, there are probably about 160 pointing to Quirk.biz and about 120 pointing to Quirk.co.za
So, is there any room for cloaking in your SEO strategy? I can’t see it being part of mine in the near future…

2007/03/23 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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