Cloaking and Blackhat SEO tools

Unfortunate to see a thread discussing cloaking at SEW closed.

Seems that some people thought to throw passionate personal morality into the discussion, rather than learn more about a technique that remains esoteric, and requires further understanding.

I don’t use cloaking - I have neither the experience nor technical knowledge to - but I would have appreciated more information on different uses and applications.

It seems that too many were jumping into the issue with an attitude that can be summarised as thus:

The internet should be fair; business on the internet should be fair

It’s hard not to see a level of naivete and amateurism in such an approach to business in any media.

What the discussion did throw up were some interesting comments on why cloaking is applied, so I’ll list these here along with other information I’ve picked up on the subject:

• Good cloaking should be relevant to the surfer’s requirements
• Good cloaking should never be obvious to most people, even upon investigation
• Cloaking can be used to provide additional keyword descriptions, such as misspellings
• Cloaking can be required for large corporations, who will not allow even basic SEO-friendly work from one department (marketing) to intrude upon another (design/IT)
• Cloaking can help give Flash sites a proper description of their purpose and content
• There is always risk, but bad cloaking is more risky than technically accomplished cloaking
• Search engines may not penalise cloaking it is aware of, if the cloaking clearly serves the surfers requirements without deceiving them

It was also worth noting that someone raised the issue of using the noscript tag to add additional keyword information, even on SEO-friendly sites.

Mark Angeletti has already written an article on Optimising Flash, which also advocates considering use of cloaking for search engine friendliness.

Of course, there’s little point mentioning cloaking without also referencing fantomaster - run by Ralph Tegtmeier and Dirk Brockhausen, who has an introduction to mod_rewrite re-published here by kind permission.

Both are very friendly people, and having already met them at rcjordan’s SEO Roadshow at the Citte of Yorke last September, I’m looking forward to meeting them again either at the Threadwatch Stansted meet, or SES London this coming week, and hopefully discussing cloaking in a more friendly and less confrontational environment.

While we’re on the subject of cloaking, here’s a resource that may well be worth taking note of: Blackhat Tools

I’ve not used any of these tools, so I don’t know how effective they may. I suspect that in an aggressively industrious campaign they could be very effectively used. It’s not my method of operation, but it’s still worth noting such tools and applications.