I frequently get asked how it is possible to ping pages that are not blogs (ie cloaked pages). You ping your cloaked pages the same way you would ping a blog page. There are a number of ways you can do this though.

One way is to go to a pinging service like pingomatic.com or pingoat.com and just type in the URL of the cloaked page that you want to be pinged. Also, I know that Joseph Tierney has a free pinger tool that I used to use a few years ago. Joseph is the creator of BloggerGenerator, so you might be able to go over to his website and find the free download.

The final way to ping your cloaked pages is to use EWI. EWI has a built-in pinger. Based on the cloaked pages that EWI creates, EWI also configures a pinger that is hosted on your server as a PHP file. Then to ping several pinging services all you need to do is go to the URL of the pinger script (ie http://www.yourdomain.com/pinger.php) and a random cloaked page will be pinged. After running this script you will see almost immediately several search engine bots, including google and yahoo, start to spider your website. This pinger is a HUGE bonus with EWI and by itself is probably worth more than the monthly subscription price to EWI.

A common issue of concern among people cloaking is that the person clicking on your cloaked page in the search engine results will notice that they are being redirected to a different page in their browser and be weary of your website. While an extremely savvy internet user might notice this redirection, 99.99% of internet users will not notice that they just got redirected. Of the 0.01% of internet users who noticed that they got redirected to another 99.99% will probably not care or not know how it happened.

I guess the point I am trying to make here is to not worry about this “problem”. The issue can be resolved using iframes and some other tricks, but to be honest I think you would be just wasting your time. There are legitimate reasons to redirect users to a different page and almost all internet users won’t even notice or care about being redirected. As long as you give your visitor a solution to what they were searching for and don’t spam them, then you shouldn’t have any worries.

My advice is don’t worry about it, but rather spend your time on your content, template, and backlinks.

Enjoy!

I saw this question come up today and it is a popular question on the forums…

Can I use Search Engine Cloaker with Free Web Hosting?

The answer to this question is yes, but would I recommend it, NO! There are a number of issues with running SEC on free web hosting. I will try to discuss a few of them here, but I am sure that there are others.

The first issue has to do with having full control over your hosting. You have probably heard the expression “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. There is also no such thing as free hosting. The free host usually makes money by putting advertising on your website and hoping that the ads make more money than the bandwidth expenses. If your cloaked site isn’t making an money for the free web hosting service, they are likely to drop your website and you will be out of luck.

Another issue is that I have seen a lot of bugs and limitations on SEC caused by free hosting. Sometimes free hosting doesn’t offer .htaccess or limits other things you can do with SEC. These limitations severely limit the full potential of SEC and I promise you that you will make more money buy hosting SEC yourself on a shared server.

I personally have never used a free host, but I have heard a lot of horror stories. With hosting prices so cheap these days it just doesn’t make sense to use SEC on a free hosting service. Free hosting services are alright for personal websites or other websites you don’t care too much about, but I wouldn’t put any money sites on free hosting.

Do yourself a favor and pay $6 a month for unlimited domains over at DreamHost.

I talk to a lot of people new to the cloaking industry and constantly I see that people are missing the big picture. I guess it is understandable that it is easy to get caught up in all the details of cloaking and lose focus of the big picture and general strategy. This post will hopefully help everyone refocus their efforts and remind people of the basics that can sometimes easily be overlooked.

Goal
The goal of cloaking is very simple…create a cloaked website that, when in test mode, a human would not be able to tell that the website was auto generated. This means using a template that has an attractive design as well as creating content that is unique, human readable, and grammatically correct. If your cloaked websites follow the rules above then you are 90% on your way to being successful. Remember that SEC and EWI are just tools and that it is still required that you use your brain and some creativity to put it all together.

Competitive Advantage
As cloakers, our competitive advantage over other website owners is very simple: mass production and automation. While a cloaker can create a 2,000 page website in a few hours, it takes the same blogger a few years to create a comparable size website. For this reason, cloakers need to leverage mass production and automation as much as possible. The more cloaked websites you can produce and the more pages you have indexed in the search engines, then the more money you will make.

Utilizing Your Strengths - Knowing Your Weaknesses
There are a lot of steps to creating a successful cloaked website: SEO, designing a template, keyword research, content creation/manipulation, backlinks, and promotion. It is very rare to have a cloaker who is an expert in each step of creating a cloaked website. This is why it is very important to know your strengths and weaknesses. Personally, my strengths include all the steps from start to finish to creating a cloaked website, but I suck at promoting it and getting backlinks, which is a crucial step in the process. So rather than struggle at getting backlinks or not doing it at all, I outsource it to someone who knows what they are doing. Usually this is someone who, like me, has realized their strengths and weaknesses and their strength is in automation and sometimes blackhat techniques to easily build massive amounts of backlinks. I guess the main point here is that you should either outsource or team up with someone who has complementary skills as you to cover all the facets of the cloaking process.

Networking
Elaborating on the topic above, it is also very important to network. Reach out to experts in the field and try to figure out what they are doing. Then take what you learn and apply it to your business. A lot of my best ideas come from conversations with other cloakers that get my creative juices flowing. Networking is not easy though. Before you contact an “expert” make sure you have something to bring to the table or else they are not going to want to talk to you. If you are good at programming maybe make a little application that could help this “expert” and contact them asking them what they think about it. Don’t just go to an “expert” and say “Can you help me?” and expect them to open up and tell you everything they know which has taken them years of trial and error to learn.

Think Like the Search Engines
When ever you do something think to yourself “What would the search engines think if they saw my cloaked website?”. So may times I get questions that are irrational and usually my response to these questions begin with “Well if you look at it from the perspective of the search engines…”. One example of this is the question I get very frequently of “Will my money site (on a separate domain) get banned if my cloaked website (also on a different domain) gets banned?”. Now if you think about this question from the search engines point of view they can’t possibly ban a website because a cloaked website was redirecting to it. If they did then us cloakers could wipe out all our competition by creating spammy cloaked websites that redirect to our legitimate competitors.

Enjoy!

I can’t stress enough how important it is to use “html” as your cloak word. Using “html” as your cloak word allows you to use optimized cloaked URLs that will rank better in the search engines. Using “html” as your cloak word is considered an advanced technique and it is required that you have the Templates
Add-on to properly implement this method, but the benefits greatly exceed the few extra steps required to implement “html” as your cloak word.

To setup SEC to use “html” as your cloak word follow the following steps…

1.) Go to the “Advanced” tab inside your SEC Management Console
2.) Go to the “Enable .htaccess and setup Cloak Word” section
3.) Enable .htaccess
4.) Set your Cloak Word to “html” (without the quotes)
5.) Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Submit Now” to save your settings

Now that you have the settings set in your SEC Management Console you need to configure your .htaccess file. To get the code to add to your .htaccess file follow the following steps…

1.) Click on the “Manual” tab of the SEC Management Console
2.) Scroll down to the “Advanced Techniques: .htaccess cloaking” section
3.) Copy the code that is generated for you. It should look something like the following…

options all
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule html /cgi-bin/index.pl [L]

4.) Now that you have the .htaccess code add it to the root or home directory on your website.

You now have .htaccess cloaking setup with “html” as your cloak word. This means that any cloaked URL with “html” in it will be redirected to your landing page. For example, you can now create clean URLs that look like “http://www.domain.com/a-keyword-phrase.html” and of course this cloaked URL will be optimized for “a keyword phrase”.

Using this strategy will greatly improve your search engine rankings as the search engines add more weight if your page has the keyword in the URL. You can now also use the [linkwords] command in your templates to put “a keyword phrase” anywhere in your website. So this means that if you put <title>[linkwords]</title> in your template you can now have the keyword phrase you want to rank for in your title, which will help your search engine rankings even further. Elaborating on this search engine optimization example you can put [linkwords] in your meta tags, h1 tags, alt tags, and then sprinkle it throughout your text. Hopefully you can see the power of using “html” as your cloak word…

EDIT:  I almost forgot to mention…all the work listed above to set “html” as your cloak word is automatically done when you use EWI saving you a lot of time in manual labor.

Enjoy!