BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

Cloaking is a black hat SEO method where the webmaster configures a script that shows different content to the search engine spiders from what is shown to normal human visitors. There are two techniques to accomplish this.

1) The site controls the delivery of content based on the IP address of the user requesting the page.

2) The site controls the delivery of content based on the “user agent” or HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

Users identified as search engine spiders activate a server-side script that shows a different version of the page, usually containing content not present or invisible on the page fed to human visitors. The whole purpose of cloaking is to show a spam page to the search engines that is optimized for rankings but to show a friendly non-spam site to regular human visitors.

Cloaking is a “doorway page” technique. The idea is to get lots of spammy pages ranking for lots of keywords and bring quick traffic. Sites that cloak for what the search engines consider “deceitful” purposes are usually black-listed once spotted or ratted out by competitors.

Since the site’s content is considered “spectacular” to be ranking high, most sites that cloak have short-lived careers at the top of the search engines, therefore cloaking should only be practiced on “expendable” domain names.

IP delivery is considered the most effective form of cloaking. This form references a database of known search engines spider IP addresses and serves a spam page to those IP addresses while it displays the main content page to all other IP addresses. IP delivery isn’t illegal or against terms of service though, since it is also used to geographically target visitors on white hat sites to show geographically significant content. Google itself uses IP delivery in it’s Adsense and Adwords programs to show custom content to visitors worldwide. Many of the most popular websites like Amazon, Ebay, and Yahoo actively use IP delivery. None of these have been banned from search engines because, according to Google, their intention is not deceptive.

Here are three IP delivery cloaking scripts you can use:

*RECOMMENDED* KloakIt Just $99.95 for one domain! $999.95 for unlimited domains!

Fantomaster Webmaster Suite $560

IP-delivery $995

Phantom Cloaker is a publicly available software application that runs from your PC. The software claims to do following:

1. Create optimized Pages which appear to have been hand made and contain genuine content. (not really, there aren’t very many templates. Can you say “FOOTPRINT!!!”)

2. Include custom text or html that you want to appear on all the highly optimized pages (yeah, it really does this…)

3. Hide the fully optimized content from your visitors and show them your website or any url you specify. (yes it does this) Advance Cloaking techniques insure your pages are indexed and are not exposed to others snooping around at your source codes. (none of my cloaked pages were indexed after a week of trying)

4. Provides several html cleaning and formatting options which insure standards compliant and search engine friendly optimized html pages. (Not exactly sure why they claim this, didn’t seem like something very important…)

5. Uses several optimized templates to generate static pages. (Several as in, like, FOUR! They claim on their website that lots of other templates are available on their web site. I didn’t check so that may or may not be true.)

The program is very easy to use. Any n00b who can point and click can get a bunch of black hat pages up fast. The application offers four different options for cloaking, but the only server-side kind (and hence, the only possibly useful kind) is based on user-agents.

Phantom Cloaker defends its use of cloaking via user-agents instead by IP stating the fact that a human reviewer can always fake their IP and so IP-Delivery isn’t really any better that cloaking by user-agent. There may be some truth to that, but it’s well known that the search engines have some spiders that disguise their user-agent and filter out cloaked or spam sites somewhat automatically.

I am of the opinion that IP delivery delivers superior results. The biggest reason I say that is that I got ZERO results with Phantom Cloaker’s software. I tested it on a domain that began as a white hat site and got indexed for a couple of months, then I switched it over to my cloaked pages that I made with Phantom Cloaker. I used some black hat backlinking methods and pinged the pages in order to get them indexed, especially the site map.

None of the new pages have been indexed and it’s been well over a week. I was expecting to have my domain banned by now, but it still shows up on both Google and Yahoo.

Basically, the software was a useless waste of time for me. It also appears that the software hasn’t been updated for well over a year. That’s an ETERNITY in black hat software programming, so it appears that the creator has probably abandoned the project.

Phantom Cloaker gets a 1/10 rating.

Yeah I know that’s pretty harsh, but it’s my duty to tell the truth here and the truth is I got ZERO results and wasted my time with this software.

Phantom Cloaker is NOT RECOMMENDED

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO tactic that webmasters use to inflate the perceived relevance of the website to a specific keyword phrase. Favorite places to stuff keywords are the meta tags, including the title and description tag. Many search engines completely ignore the “keywords” meta tag but still use the title and description tag so the method can still get results.

The method is old, and not usually employed by professional black hat optimizers. It used to be extremely effective in getting rankings and visibility, but the major search engines have algorithms that detect and penalize this behavior.

Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

The most basic form of keyword stuffing in the content of the page is to make the text the same color as the background of the page, making it initially invisible to humans. It is easily detected, however, using the mouse cursor to select suspicious regions of webpages, as well as looking in Google’s “cache” version of the page which highlights the keywords in your search.

More advanced keyword stuffing utilizes the power of CSS to “Z” position the text behind an image, making it invisible. There is also the possible “absolute” positioning that moves the text far from the center of the page. For the past few years, these techniques have been unmasked and the search engines don’t reward this type of stuffing.

A method that still works is the use of “Noscript” tags, since they are a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of scripted content. This is a place blackhatters abuse, since search engines may index content that is invisible to most visitors.

Nobody can say that there is a perfect keyword density anymore. I personally aim for about 1% but some sites rank well with higher percentages and others with lower. Keyword stuffing is extremely risky since if detected, you most certainly will be penalized. I tried it on a site and went from #1 to #800. It took a couple of months and some begging to get it back - once the stuffed keywords were removed. This tactic is only recommended on completely disposable sites.