Eric Rockefeller | Internet Marketing Rockstar

May 14th, 2009 - Eric Rockefeller

Link cloaking is the art of hiding links, whether from potential customers or from search engines.  It is the process if linking to another site or an intermediary by sending out humans or bots or both of them to another site.

Link cloaking strategies are important for you to protect yourself when you are buying products, services or links.  There are known three benefits of link cloaking and they are called All 301 Redirect, Bot Redirect, and User Redirect.

The most common of which is the 301 Redirect.  This works this way when a user clicks on a site that’s linked to the second site, it leads them directly to the third site.

Another strategy would demand you as the webmaster to cloak the content.  This is the bot redirect.  That is how link cloaking is said to have many advantages to both white and black hat SEO strategies.  This is when the SE Bots get 301 redirected to site C while the ordinary surfers get the real content in site B.

The third site is user direct.  It’s when an ordinary user who clicks on the link between A to B is redirected to C while the search engine bots are directed to the genuine site.  This is often considered a black hat strategy by most web masters.

Here are some techniques that cloak links to potential customers:
•    Script redirects – This is the use of simple script that takes a key and sends the visitor to the merchant’s website.
•    Meta refreshes – This is a popular strategy that uses blank HTML pages with the meta refresh tag and embeds the affiliate tracking code.
•    In-line Java script – This is the use of Java script to capture the mouse over in order to make the status bar display the link without the tracking code.
•    Encoding URLs – The use of HTML codes confuses the tracking links or codes from your visitors.
•    Java script and image links – This technique is really advanced and is uncommon. What it tries to do is use Java script to capture on click event and have the code pull a transparent image before transferring control to the new page.  The URL of the transparent image is really the tracking script that receives the tracking codes as part of the URL.

Some strategies to cloak links to the search engines are the following:
•    Use of rel=”no-follow” anchor attribute.  It is not considered technically to be cloaking but the results are the same.
•    Use of no-follow and/or no-index meta tag
•    Crawler user agent check
•    Crawlers IPs check
•    Robot.txt disallow
•    Use of robots-nocontent class
•    Robot.txt disallow and crawler IPs check

The HTML source and robot.txt file will be the best sources for you to know whether or not the link is cloaked.  So scrutinize them closely especially the cache versions of these files.

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