cloaking - is this still working ? And how ?

Any help here ?
Or even point me to the relevant forum ?

No it's not working. Cloaking is one of those techniques that are useless against modern Google algorithms.

The reason you'd cloak a page is to hide your sources, where you get your offer and your landing pages so people don't steal your campaigns.

Zephyrlon is right. But let me expound your issue further.

Why would you use a cloaking software/service?

For 2 reasons...

1.) You don't want to link directly to a page outside your blog/site especially if the page is not related or optimized for the niche your blog/site is. These cloaking software enables you to create a dummy link with your blog URL + extension URL (i.e. yourblog.com/affiliateproductname.). That way it does is not pass on any link juice from that page back to your blog/site, which could potentially hurt or damage your SERP rankings. What if the page is torn down? What if they had technical issues? What if the offer no longer exist? These are some of the scenarios you would be dealing with if you chose to link to them directly.

If this is not an issue for you, don't worry about it too much!

2.) Google (and most SE) does not allow affiliate links on your blog pointing to an external page that has nothing to do or has no value to users whatsoever (in terms of getting people the right information). It is considered spam. So cloaking software tricks the algorithm by using a dummy URL of your blog + extension.

No when it comes to your question... "Does it still work?"

If you are using it wrongly and only offer crap content, crap information and crap everything, and insert a cloaked affiliate link. Then the answer is NO!

But...

If you do the exact opposite, providing value to your customers/visitors/readers, then YES you are good to go!

Take a for example smartpassiveincome.com site. Pat is using a plugin called pretty link to cloak the affiliate links. But he also mentioned on his disclaimer page that he is indeed earning through affiliates. That's transparency and honesty for you!

I hope this lit up the light in your tunnel.

Cheers,

Anthony

Cloaking is a blackhat technique but once you get a manual review, you will get shut down pretty quickly. It's not a very long term deal - you will have to continually buy new domains, get new IPs, etc. You could make alot of money with it, but it's not a real business for long term income.

If by "still working" you're asking if it can still boost your rankings (at least in the short term) then yes. I have a client that had been "accidentally" cloaking (they use lightboxes to display information...not to "rank" for the text in the lightbox but it simply ends up being "hidden text" ) and they rank for the phrases in their hidden text. Mind you, that wasn't the point of their adding "hidden" text. It was an honest mistake by developers who thought they were doing the right thing. The content in the lightbox was not filled with "keywords." Nevertheless, the client ranked for the content in the lightbox. So in short, it does still "work."

However as stated above, if you are caught cloaking you can be in some serious penalties\, and whatever short term gain you realize may likely be offset (in spades) via penalty.

I don't think is the cloaking is still working the reason is the Google algorithm and update consider cloaking a black hat and spamming ..

I build about 100 cloaked sites a week - what is it that you specifically want to know?

Does it work?
Yes, extremely well. (also depends on your software for doing it)

Does that site you linked to have anything to do with search engine cloaking?
Not really.

^^ Doesn't know what he's talking about and has probably never done it.

Also - why the hell is this in Growth Hacking?
This is definitely a SEO technique.

Cloaking use to work, but that technique is really outdated now.

Cloaking - is this still working ? And how ? | Moz Q&A

My response is:
1. Your budget is better spent developing high quality, unique content.
2. If you want to commit yourself to trying to say ahead of everyone at google, by all means, have fun. However, by the time most black hat techniques have garnered as much attention as cloaking has, they have pretty much lived out their usefulness.
3 This is a violation of google's guidelines and will most likely get you penalized now or in the near future.
4 Admittedly, you're new to cloaking but confident you could figure it out...I just find that dangerous. I wouldn't implement something on my site, I didn't fully understand, especially if it's something google doesn't like.

So dont do it.