On Page SEO by ADITYAKUMAR YADAV

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adityakumar_y — 2018-09-10 08:45:46 UTC

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

Premkumar Thewar 1514063

premkumar_thewar — 2018-09-11 10:08:51 UTC

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.

Ankit Tiwari (1514057)

ankit_lt — 2018-09-11 10:10:47 UTC

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

Dipen Gupta - 1514082

2018-09-21 05:21:12 UTC

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.

Jayesh Gaur - 1514080

jayesh_gaur — 2018-09-24 15:29:21 UTC

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!).

Amandeep Chabada(1514072)

2018-09-24 16:13:32 UTC

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.

Jay Haria - 1514083

2018-09-24 19:29:06 UTC

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.

Nirali Ashar - 1514067

2018-09-24 19:32:48 UTC

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.

Amey Bansode - 1514071

2018-09-24 20:54:10 UTC

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.

Advait Bhat(1514070)

2018-09-25 06:29:21 UTC

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.

Dhruvin Jain - 1514084

2018-09-25 09:09:48 UTC

Dhruvin Jain - 1514084

2018-09-25 09:09:51 UTC

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:

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.
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.
“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!

Sonal Dharmik - 1514076

sonal_dharmik — 2018-09-25 10:02:31 UTC

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.

Vaibhav Vishwanath 1514064

2018-09-25 10:10:48 UTC

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/

Shranik Vora- 1514060

2018-09-27 10:20:37 UTC

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:

Create a folder from where you’ll serve your redirects. At Yoast we use /out/.
Block the /out/ folder in your robots.txt file by adding:
```
Disallow: /out/
```
Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.