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Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) for better indexing. In other words, cloak definition is, the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings by making a cloak content.  You might have understood now that cloaking is an illegal practice and is considered a Black hat SEO. The Search engine may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking.

Some examples of cloaking include:

Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users

Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

The basic process of cloaking affiliate links is simple:

1. Create a folder from where you’ll serve your redirects. At Yoast we use /out/.

2. Block the /out/ folder in your robots.txt file by adding:

3. Disallow: /out/

4. Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.

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Cloaking:
Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in such a way that different content than what is delivered to a regular human user appears on the search engine.
Cloaking affiliate links:
You then need to set up a script to identify search engine bots and spiders as distinct from real visitors, based on IP addresses-known as IP cloaking- or user-agent HTTP headers, and use the server-side script to return the “clean” version of your website or link to bots and spiders, keeping the real or main version for your human visitors only.

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Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) for better indexing. In other words, cloak definition is, the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings by making a cloak content.  You might have understood now that cloaking is an illegal practice and is considered a Black hat SEO. The Search engine may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking.

A quick online search will result in tons of reasons as to why you should redirect your affiliate links. The “historical” reason for this is hiding from search engines that you’re an affiliate. It would be naive to think that search engines don’t understand what’s happening, but nevertheless this seems like a valid reason.

There are also a few more advantages to cloaking your affiliate links, such as:

1. Ease of management
Sometimes you might need to change your affiliate links. If said links are spread out across your blog, this could become a quite time-intensive task. By centralizing the affiliate links, you have one location to manage all of them.

2. Prevents leaking PageRank to advertisers
Affiliate links are ads and should not be followed otherwise altered to prevent leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of having to do this manually for every individual affiliate link, you can do this is a single location without much hassle. This also prevents the possibility of forgetting to add nofollow to one of the links.

3. “Clean” links
Different affiliate programs tend to use different permalink structures. Some might have relatively ‘clean’ links, whereas others tend to add a lot of gibberish. Using the redirect script can help you deal with this issue because the cloaked URL will always follow the same structure. This makes it a lot clearer for the user where the link is taking them to!

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Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) for better indexing. In other words, cloak definition is, the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings by making a cloak content.Hence this is considered as a black hat technique.
Cloaking your Afiiliate Links
1) Edit  a PHP cloaking file which is responsible for cloaking and which can be downloaded through the internet
2)Change the lines of code containing  $myhomepage = ‘http://google.com’; and change it to your website url.
3)Now just add the affiliate links with $name1 and $dest1 variables.
For example if you want to create a redirection (i.e. hide a link) to Yahoo then these lines could look like this:
$name1 = ‘yahoo’;
$dest1 = ‘http://yahoo.com’;
You can also create more than 1 affiliate links.
There are also services which do the affiliation for you such as https://bitly.com/

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cloaking is a black hat SEO technique used to mask affiliate links and websites, which is intended to trick search engine bots and spiders into believing that the content of your links or website are something other than what they really are.
cloaking involves designing two completely different types of content for your website or links, one specifically for search engine spiders and bots, and one for your real visitors. The version that you create for bots and spiders should, of course, be “clean,” and designed to pass safe search filters.

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Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique used to mask affiliate links and websites, which is intended to trick search engine bots and spiders into believing that the content of your links or website are something other than what they really are.
Steps:
1.  Designing two completely different types of content for your website or links, one specifically for search engine spiders and bots, and one for your real visitors.
2. Set up a script to identify search engine bots and spiders as distinct from real visitors, based on IP addresses-known as IP cloaking and use the server-side script to return the clean version of your website or link to bots and spiders, keeping the real or main version for your human visitors only.

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Cloaking is Displaying a different version of your content to bots and spiders leaving your real content hidden, meaning that search engines themselves will not be able to identify the true nature of your website and link content.

Cloaking for affiliate links can also help to boost your traffic by winning click-throughs from visitors that might otherwise not find or choose to visit your website or link.

Steps:                                        1)create 2 content versions for your website

2) Set up a script to identify search engine bots and spiders as different from actual traffic.

There is a number of cloaking websites and affiliate link cloaker services that provide automated affiliate script cloaking services that you can use to simplify the process, or you can manually cloak your website and/or links yourself at the coding level.

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Cloaking is one of the oldest black hat methods around. The idea is simple: show users an optimized landing page and give bots SEO optimized content stuffed with keywords etc.
Cloaking affiliate links:
The basics of cloaking involve designing two completely different types of content for your website or links, one specifically for search engine spiders and bots, and one for your real visitors. The version that you create for bots and spiders should, of course, be “clean,” and designed to pass safe search filters.
You then need to set up a script to identify search engine bots and spiders as distinct from real visitors, based on IP addresses-known as IP cloaking- or user-agent HTTP headers, and use the server-side script to return the “clean” version of your website or link to bots and spiders, keeping the real or main version for your human visitors only.

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Cloaking is the process where the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings by making a cloak content.

Using cloaking, content is delivered based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
Cloaking is done by modifying a file called .htaccess. Apache server has a module called “mod_rewrite”.
With the help of this module in the .htaccess file, you can apply a cloaking technique for your web pages. Webmasters gather search engines’ IP addresses or User-Agents (search engine crawlers). If mod_rewrite module detects that an IP address or user-agent belongs to a search engine, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page (cloak URL).
If IP address doesn’t belong to any crawler, it means it is a regular visitor and delivers a normal web page.

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Cloaking is a practice of presenting different content to users and search engines. Often used to improve indexing, it is considered a violation and Search Engines highly condemn this once detected.

However, it is highly recommended to cloak your links if you are into affiliate marketting. It helps in avoiding leaks of your PageRank to advertisers and enables the redirect function, thus Besides, it also shortens the URL and gives it a clean look.

Various tools are available online which help you in cloaking your affiliate links, one such tool is LinkTrakr (Link below!).

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Get free affiliate marketing tips, advice and affiliate network reviews from LinkTrackr's affiliate marketing blog.

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Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers.
This is done for better indexing of website.

The following tool (atleast for WordPress) can be used :

"Thirsty Affiliates Affiliate link cloaker for WordPress"

The plugin offers two ways to add the affiliate links. You can either go to Affiliate links> Add new & cloak your affiliate link.

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Cloaking is a process in which websites are made in a way that they rank top on the search engine but the content is totally irrelevant or rubbish.
Now there are two kinds of IP addresses, namely User IP and Bot IP address. The User IP address is constant as the user is a desktop, mobile phone,tablet,etc. But bots have constantly changing IP addresses. The one who cloaks a website frequently makes note of the bot IP addresses and provides them with fresh and relevant content. Since the user IP address is static, cloaker does not need to know their IP address and can post some irrelevant content. So bots feel that the content are fresh and relevant but in reality the user gets rubbish content irrespective of the site being in the top rankings. The top rankings improves site traffic under the assumption that contents in the site are relevant to what they want.

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Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) for better indexing. Cloaking is
considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results
than they expected.
For cloaking your affiliate links you need to set up a script to identify search engine bots and spiders as distinct from real visitors, based on IP addresses-known as IP cloaking- or user-agent HTTP headers, and use the server-side script to return the “clean” version of your website or link to bots and spiders, keeping the real or main version for your human visitors only.
Detailed explanation cloak your affiliate link is provided in the given link

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We regularly consult for sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. We usually advise people to redirect affiliate links. In the past, we noticed that there wasn't a proper script available online that could handle this for us, so we created one to tackle this problem. In this post, I explain how you can get your hands on it and how you can get it running on your website.

Why should I cloak my affiliate links?

A quick online search will result in tons of reasons as to why you should redirect your affiliate links. The "historical" reason for this is hiding from search engines that you're an affiliate. It would be naive to think that search engines don't understand what's happening, but nevertheless this seems like a valid reason.

There are also a few more advantages to cloaking your affiliate links, such as:

1. Ease of management
Sometimes you might need to change your affiliate links. If said links are spread out across your blog, this could become a quite time-intensive task. By centralizing the affiliate links, you have one location to manage all of them.

2. Prevents leaking PageRank to advertisers
Affiliate links are ads andshould be nofollowed or otherwise altered to prevent leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of having to do this manually for every individual affiliate link, you can do this is a single location without much hassle. This also prevents the possibility of forgetting to add nofollow to one of the links.

3. "Clean" links
Different affiliate programs tend to use differentpermalink structures. Some might have relatively 'clean' links, whereas others tend to add a lot of gibberish. Using the redirect script can help you deal with this issue because the cloaked URL will always follow the same structure. This makes it a lot clearer for the user where the link is taking them to!

Cloaking affiliate links, the how to

The basic process of cloaking affiliate links is simple:

1. Create a folder from where you'll serve your redirects. At Yoast we use /out/.

2. Block the /out/ folder in your robots.txt file by adding:
Disallow: /out/

3. Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.

Step 2 ensures search engines won't follow the redirects, but we'll add some extra security measures in our script to prevent accidental indexation of our affiliate links. Step 3 is as easy as manually adding each redirect to your redirect directory's .htaccess file, assuming you're running your website on an Apache-based server. Alternatively, you can use the script we produced to make it easier on yourself. The added bonus of this script is that it also works for servers running Nginx!

Affiliate link redirect script

The script we created consists of three files, one of which is optional: an index.php file, a redirects.txt file and, to finish it all off, a .htaccess file to prettify your URLs.

Index.php

This file contains the logic that handles the actual redirection by performing a 302 redirect. Additionally, it sends a X-Robots-Tag header along to ensure search engines that can detect this header, obey the noindex, nofollow rules we pass along in it. We do this as an extra security measure in case you might forget to exclude the affiliate link in your robots.txt.

Redirects.txt

The redirects.txt file is a comma-separated file that contains a list of names and destination URLs like so:

yoast,https://yoast.com

Note that the file should always contain the following line at the very top to ensure people don't attempt to redirect themselves to a non-existing URL:

default,http://example.com

Just change example.com to your own domain and you're ready to go!

.htaccess

If you only install the above two files, you'll already have enough in place to get things running. However, we advise you prettify the URLs, because this dramatically increases the readability. Without prettifying your URLs, you'll end up with something like /out/?id=yoast instead of /out/yoast.

Prettifying can be achieved by adding a .htaccess file to the mix. This small file also helps ensure people can't access your redirects.txt file to take a peek and see what affiliate links are available.

What about plugins?

In the past we've received questions about using WordPress plugins to tackle this cloaking issue. Despite there being a lot of valid options, they have one small caveat: speed. Because these plugins depend on WordPress' core code, they need to wait for it to be fully booted before being able to execute themselves. This can easily add a second or two to the total loading and redirecting time if you're on a slow server.
Our non-plugin solution is faster because it doesn't depend on WordPress to run.

Ultimately, the best option depends on your needs. If you want to collect statistics on your affiliate links, you might be better off with a plugin. Otherwise, just use our script to keep things fast.

The files

If you're interested in running this nifty script on your own website, you can download the files. Feeling adventurous? You can find the source code on GitHub. People running Nginx can find sample code in this gist to see how to make it work for them.

Read more: Playing with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header "

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How to cloak your affiliate links * Yoast

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We regularly consult for sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. We usually advise people to redirect affiliate links. In the past, we noticed that there wasn't a proper script available online that could handle this for us, so we created one to tackle this problem.

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What is Cloaking and How to Cloak your Affiliate Links to Improve SEO and Site Traffic ?