To Cloak, Or Not To Cloak

[deloriagod]

Hey guys I'm just curious what your opinions about this are..

Are you truly penalized for link cloaking?

When I first got into internet marketing I was told to cloak my affiliate links. However since then I've read things about link cloaking being harmful to your SERPs. Has it been proven to be harmful or is this another big worry that doesn't really exist (like the sandbox)?

[HunterSnake]

Yes, you're penalized in the harshest ways possible. No, do not cloak if you care about your web site's Google listing.

[deloriagod]

Thanks HunterSnake, I'll definitely remove the cloaking. SERPs are important to me lol

[HunterSnake]

Originally Posted by deloriagod

Thanks HunterSnake, I'll definitely remove the cloaking. SERPs are important to me lol

Good boy. Cloaking is a severe offense. Avoiding violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines is very important... but ESPECIALLY do not break the rules listed here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

[deloriagod]

I think I'm clean now, the only thing on that list that I was violating was link cloaking. It mentions hidden text though. I'm using WordPress which can be a pain in the butt to format my text exactly how I want it. Is it ok to put hit enter, put a period, hit enter again and then hide that period so that I have the extra space in there? I can't imagine that would break the no hidden text rule because it's not like I'm hiding keywords or whatnot.

[BobJutsu]

Silly people saying silly things that they don't really understand...

"Link Cloaking" is not the same thing as "content cloaking"/ip delivery.

Pay attention boys and girls, and get some learnin' on. Link cloaking is, as the name implies, redirecting your links as a means of disguising where they go. Link cloaking is normally done with some type of redirect (301, anyone) and doesn't cause any harm or cause any penalty. The path doesn't decieve anybody, and people and spiders can follow the links exactly the same. The purpose is to hide affiliate urls, and clean up ugly urls. All in all, it's really nothing more than a redirect.

Content cloaking/ip delivery, on the other hand, is completely different. It is the practice of giving one set of content to the spiders and another to humans. You are "cloaking" your real content based on IP, in order to delivery different content to the engines. This is considered to be deception and therefore frowned upon and penalized.

However, even IP delivery has it's place. It is commonly used to give "written" content to spiders and an all flash based content to humans. As long as the content is the same(ish) it is "supposed" to be okay...but that doesn't mean you won't get penalized at some point.

To recap:
Link cloaking, aka redirected = just fine
Content cloaking, aka ip delivery = strong possibility of being penalized

[kursat]

I have to agrre with BobJutsu, you do need to cloak your affiliate links as some search engines, do not give value to sites which has direct links to affiliate products.

So, if it is only an affiliate link you cloak with a simple redirect PHP code, you are safe. Well, thats my view on it. Google changes on how they look at things all the time, so anything is possible

[nouseforaname]

I don't think cloaking will harm your site. What about twitter as for instance?
There are many peoples' tweets using url shortening to hide their link am I right?

[thetruth23]

Originally Posted by BobJutsu

Silly people saying silly things that they don't really understand...

"Link Cloaking" is not the same thing as "content cloaking"/ip delivery.

Pay attention boys and girls, and get some learnin' on. Link cloaking is, as the name implies, redirecting your links as a means of disguising where they go. Link cloaking is normally done with some type of redirect (301, anyone) and doesn't cause any harm or cause any penalty. The path doesn't decieve anybody, and people and spiders can follow the links exactly the same. The purpose is to hide affiliate urls, and clean up ugly urls. All in all, it's really nothing more than a redirect.

Content cloaking/ip delivery, on the other hand, is completely different. It is the practice of giving one set of content to the spiders and another to humans. You are "cloaking" your real content based on IP, in order to delivery different content to the engines. This is considered to be deception and therefore frowned upon and penalized.

However, even IP delivery has it's place. It is commonly used to give "written" content to spiders and an all flash based content to humans. As long as the content is the same(ish) it is "supposed" to be okay...but that doesn't mean you won't get penalized at some point.

To recap:
Link cloaking, aka redirected = just fine
Content cloaking, aka ip delivery = strong possibility of being penalized

I agree. I've never thought there was anything wrong with it either.

[thetruth23]

Ahh, maybe Google just defines the word cloaking somewhat differently than was implied in the OP.

From Google.

Cloaking is serving different content to users from the content served to search engines. This is generally done with the intent of boosting one's ranking in search results.

What affiliate would do: create a page on there website (for new url) which gets auto-redirected to the affiliate site. Nothing wrong with that, just like BobJutsu said. It's a simple redirect.

[F1SEO]

Just picking up this thread a bit ...

One of my personal sites got nailed by Google. It was a 200 UV/day site generating a reasonable amount of Adsense income. I put some affiliate links and used a cloaker so that people couldn't easily see that it was aff links to products.

After about 1 month my site dropped like a led balloon. Went from 200, to 10 UVs - all from Yahoo. Google dropped it like a stone. It took me ages to build that site and I wasn't going to let it go.

I removed the aff link cloaker and wrote to Google asking for reinclusion. After some justification, and a complete admission that I'd messed up, they said that they'd review it and said they didn't detect a problem. However for 4 months all my hits disappeared.

Now it's back to 200UV a day.

I'd never play with affiliate links again. I was lucky to get the site back in.

[orvn]

Originally Posted by deloriagod

Has it been proven to be harmful or is this another big worry that doesn't really exist (like the sandbox)?

Wait wait wait, the sandbox isn't real??!

[yukon]

Looks to me like Google is encouraging link cloaking http://goo.gl/

Isn't a tinyurl a redirect?

[@seo]

redirection not works as SEO friendly link.

for seo friendly link one shouldn't cloak a link. Because big Google being smart smart in SERPs techniques as time passing.

[yukon]

Originally Posted by @seo

redirection not works as SEO friendly link.

for seo friendly link one shouldn't cloak a link. Because big Google being smart smart in SERPs techniques as time passing.

Why do you care about how affiliate links rank in the SERPs?

[Social-Media-Marketing]

Originally Posted by HunterSnake

Good boy. Cloaking is a severe offense. Avoiding violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines is very important... but ESPECIALLY do not break the rules listed here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

Link cloaking and "cloaking" are two TOTALLY different things. I think HunterSnake is a bit confused.

The Cloaking that Google talks about in their Webmaster Guidelines has nothing to do with link cloaking. It has to do with showing users different content than you show crawlers when the same URL is requested. It often has to do with sneaky redirects. For example, maybe you rank for "my keyword phrase" because you are showing the crawlers content about "my keyword phrase" but when a browser (not a crawler) requests the page, you redirect the browser to a porn page or some other page that has nothing to do with "my keyword phrase. That is the "cloaking" that will get you a big fat penalty at Google.

Link cloaking just means making your affiliate links look like a normal link. So I may link to an affiliate page with http://www.example.com/go/my-affiliate-product/ instead of http://www.example.com/my-affiliate-product?aff=238828. You are showing users and crawlers the same "cloaked link", so it's NOT the same thing.

[BobJutsu]

What the OP is actually talking about isn't cloaking at all, so to avoid confusion let's use the proper term:

link Masking