[Don’t try this] Making Fool out of Google – Backlink Cloaking

Almost everyone who are reading this post would have known what does “Cloaking” means. If you had ever searched for preventing your website from Google algorithm update then you would have noticed the term “Cloaking” everywhere either it might be a forum or a blog. So everyone said you not to practice it but no one revealed what really it does to Google, Did they ?

90/100 bloggers would never give a backlink to a Gaming or xxx site, but from where do they build so many backlinks, Ever wondered ? I’m going to explain you what’s going on behind the cloaking process and why it is bad to follow for your regular sites.

This is only for educational purpose and so never try it for your website or hurt your competitor’s website. If you’re practicing it after reading my article then I’m not responsible for it and trust me Google’s will penalize your site badly if you get caught!

What’s Cloaking and Why Spammers Prefer this Method ?

Cloaking is a method or approach of manipulating search engines by showing different content to the user and to the search engines(Google). That is when I visit  your webpage I would see a technology relevant content but when Google bots crawl the same webpage it would see a Casino or Gaming relevant content.

See what Matt Cutts is saying about Cloaking : 

If you prefer to show different content to the Google bots rather than the original content then you are most probably against the Google’s quality policy guidelines.

Spammers who owns a gaming, porn or gambling niche sites are not going to get direct backlinks from any site because bloggers know that giving back a link to these kind of sites will lead their site’s to penalty. For this reason, cloaking came into the picture where a spammer can trick Google as well as the person who’s going to give links to him.

The below is the code which these black hat bloggers use for manipulating Google and they are well known of the issue that they are going to be banned when Google gets them, still they do take risks.

if (preg_match("#(google|slurp@inktomi|yahoo! slurp|msnbot)#si", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: http://www.any-porn-gambling-site.com/");
   exit;
}

A spammer will inject this code in his “Header.php” or “Function.php” file and when a Google bot crawls this header information it thinks that the page has been permanently redirected to the site mentioned inside the code. But when the user visits this webpage he will not be redirected to the secondary site because the code is written in such a way only to redirect search engines and that’s what we exactly call as Cloaking.

When you do this the secondary site will get the same Page rank, authority and allows the trust to flow but at one point Google does penalize it. So from now be careful if you’re going to give back a link to any of the blogger out there.

NOTE : if a site “A” is being redirected to a high page rank site “B” then, the site “A” gets the same page rank as the site “B”. But when the redirection is removed the page rank also gets vanished. So whenever you’re purchasing a high PR site from someone do check whether the PR is real or fake.

You can use my tool here to check it. Enter the website address and if it shows the Page Rank as ” -1 ” then for sure that’s a fake Google page rank. Once again I’m telling this do not try Cloaking and if you’re doing it then do it at your own risk.