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Cloaking, it's not just for Harry Potter

By Ryn Young


When I was a kid, cloak and dagger games were always a favorite. Pretending to be someone else, disguising yourself, all harmless fun at a young age. Harry Potter took it a step further, he even has a cloak that can turn him completely invisible!

Sadly, we are not here to reminisce about childhood fantasy. In a far more sinister use of the concept of cloaking, the online marketing world has become very familiar with a technique to trick the search engines and the consumers alike.

Cloaking is a term used by black hat marketers referring to a way to get unapproved content to be displayed by the search engines. Consumers are expecting that their search results have been properly regulated by the search engines are playing right into the hands of the marketers.

To understand how it works, let's first take a quick look at how a search engine reviews and approves content that is submitted. Obviously with billions of searches a day and tens of billions of websites, articles and blogs indexed it would be impossible to manually review every single search result. Not to mention re-review whenever content is updated. So the search engines utilize bots, or automated content search technology that can quickly scan a website and report back if the content is within the approved policies and is relevant to the search terms it is being displayed for.

Unfortunately, the use of an automated bot is exactly what allows unscrupulous marketers to trick the search engines and get otherwise unapproved content to appear in your search results. With a simple line of code or two, marketers can identify whenever a bot is coming to their website versus a real live person. Using the ability to identify that it is a review bot, they can display that review bot a completely different page of content with fully approved text and graphics. The bot takes a peek, thinks all is well and goes on to the next page. When a real live visitor comes to this same page they are displayed the real marketing content full of tricks and graphics that the search engine would normally ban outright.

Why do marketers need to do this? Unfortunately a lot of that unapproved content is the key to generating more user actions or sales on a website. The reason the search engines ban the content is specifically because marketers want to use it to influence the consumer unethically. Cloaking allows them to continue to display this type of content to the consumer and avoid the shutdown from the search engines.

Cloaking has become very prevalent in the work at home and diet industries. Unfortunately marketers have found it is easier to continue to show the consumer unethical or false content that converts very high, rather than try to develop real high quality content that would be approved. Cloaking allows them to continue to display their preferred ads and sites while the search engines work to catch up.

Specifically, in the work at home niche, this shows itself in the use of fake news sites or farticles. These fake third party endorsements of a product or opportunity are against the polices of the search engines, but on a recent peek we saw no fewer than 5 fake news sites linking directly off the organic and sponsored search results.

Why should a consumer care? While we would never advise you trust everything you see or hear on the internet, there is a level of assumed trust that search engines provide. Marketers know this and will use every trick in their book to make it appear that their product or service is fully compliant and approved for top level advertising like page 1 of the search results. The end result is usually a bad consumer experience when they discover that the endorsement or article they read before ordering the product was likely completely false and their actual results are far from what they read.

As usual, our advice is buyer beware! Those ads, reviews and articles you see on the front page of your search results are certainly not reviewed and approved as closely as you may think.




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