Cloaking is not unlike playing a game of Russian roulette. It’s a practice that violates the webmaster guidelines provided by the major search engines, and it is not recommended to those individuals unwilling to sacrifice their website for short-term financial gain. On the other hand if you have dozens of websites, none of which perform particularly well, what do you have to lose? Cloaking could provide you with the means of recapturing the investment you have already made in sites with little hope of ever making money.

A while ago on Twitter, Michael Gray asked his followers for topic ideas for a new blog post. I suggested that he put the gray back in @graywolf by writing a post on cloaking; the what, how, why, etc. He responded by pointing out that the post was not intended for his site, and that it wouldn’t be an appropriate topic for the site he was writing for. I suggested it to him because it’s a topic that I rarely see discussed on any of the popular webmaster forums, blogs and community sites. When such topics are discussed it’s usually in the context of webmaster ethics. Unfortunately, such conversations tend to become very juvenile, very fast. Ethics aside, I believe there is a strong business case to be made in favour of aggressive marketing for under performing websites.

Let’s say you have a small network of 25 websites, and you have invested 25 hours of your time into each of them. Let’s assume, for the purposes of this article, that you value your time at $25 an hour. That leaves you with over $15000 dollars invested in your sites. Again, let’s assume your network is under performing financially, and you are earning say $25 per day across all sites. That works out to $750 per month, and it will take you 20 months at those profit levels to recoup your initial investment. That’s almost two years before your sites become profitable! So let’s pretend that you’ve decided to cloak your content, serving adverts in place of your content, and your network is now producing $100 per day. That works out to $3000 per month, and if you can stay under the radar, you will have recouped your costs in 5 months. Everything after that is pure profit! In the time it would have taken you to break even prior to cloaking your content (20 months), you now have the potential to profit by $45000. To me, it seems like a reasonable gamble to consider. How many of us are ever going to make that kind of money from a small network of very average websites full of very average content?

In a previous life, I worked with a company that was willing to engage in aggressive marketing from time to time. In most cases it was for research purposes, but at times the profit motive trumped other considerations. It was business, after all. We had one site that ranked all over the place for a swath of brand-name-products in a particular sporting industry niche, and it earned around $30 a day from organic search traffic. The decision was made to start cloaking to see if we could increase revenue. Literally overnight, the site started earning hundreds of dollars a day. The only thing we changed was the positioning of our advertisements; content was pushed below the fold and ads were given prominence on the page if referrer=search engine x. In the months that followed, the site made more money than we ever would have thought. Eventually, it got smacked down, the cloaking was removed, a re-inclusion request was filed, the content got reworked, and a few new links were acquired. Everything went back to normal within a few months. It continues to earn passive income to this day, but it made a whole lot of money for a number of months. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you do decide to dabble in the dark arts in an attempt to squeeze more profit out of your websites, there are a number of things to consider. For starters, you will have to try to insulate your sites from penalty as best as you can. This means that you’ll have to be very thorough in your implementation. If you are are going to cloak, you cannot rely on simple user agent cloaking. Cloaking by user agent is really simple to sniff out. You can test this yourself by using the user-agent switcher for firefox. With this extension, you will be able to see a webpage the way it is displayed to specific user agents. If a page is displayed to you one way while your user agent is mozilla, and displayed to you another way when your user agent is googlebot, the website in question is most likely cloaking. If you want to be effective in your cloaking efforts, you might consider cloaking by user-agent, IP address, referrer, browser and perhaps even language or OS. I think it’s safe to assume that visitors from Mountain View are not there to read your very average content…

1. Go to KnowEm.com and register your brand name / business name / individual name on all of the sites in your niche.  Then use the accounts to build authority, trust and credibility.  Engage with the community.  Share your ideas and insights.

2. Write a press release about something / anything even somewhat newsworthy.  Optimize it and distribute it through PR.com, PRWeb.com, etc.  Upload it to Scribd and other such document hosting sites.  Email it directly to blogs, news sites, etc in your niche.  Get the word out.

3. If you don’t own yourname.com or yourkeyword(s).com, go to your favourite domain registrar and purchase one of them. You’ll also need some decent hosting; I highly recommend (MT)MediaTemple. Then you’ll want to install WordPress, and start building your website / blog.  You might want to check out Chris Pearson’s excellent Thesis theme, too.

4. Write a couple kickass articles, and offer them up to related sites for publication.  This is called guest posting.  Don’t forget to give yourself some good anchor text when linking back to your blog or website. Use Google News to find publishing partners in your niche, and try to establish a rapport with them.

5. For the weaker articles developed in step 4, give them a quick copy edit and distribute them via article distribution sites like EzineArticles.  Again, give yourself some decent anchor text in the body of the article and again in the footer.

6. Build a slideshow and post it to Slideshare, or shoot a quick video and post it to YouTube. Optimize the titles, descriptions, tags, etc to reflect your brand name / business name / individual name.

7. If you are a local business, be sure to claim your local listings at the search engines, review sites, etc. If you’re an individual, claim your Google profile and link to a handful of the accounts you set up in step 1.

As mentioned above, this probably won’t help you much if you are trying to rank for something competitive (think credit cards, mortgage insurance, poker, etc).  Tip: don’t be afraid to buy some links to the pages / content you’ve created above (aside from your own site, that is) to give them some extra ranking power and to help flow link juice back to your main site.  I mean, seriously…do you think Google is going to penalize Slideshare or PRWeb for buying links?

My response included a healthy reminder that SEO is a process, not a project. I ended up turning down the work, because I felt that their approach to internet marketing was short-sighted and contrary to the goal of developing defensible websites. While I was somewhat annoyed at having wasted a few hours of my time, the experience got me thinking about the disconnect that exists between people that understand the power of SEO as a distinct element within their marketing mix, and people that chase rankings for the sake of rankings.

What amused me most while looking at their sites was how incredibly well they were ranking. They were, on average, first page for all of their major terms across a small network of sites in a fairly competitive travel niche. Even more surprising was that they had next-to-no decent links from outside their own network of sites. I have to admit, I was shocked to see such impressive rankings built upon such a weak foundation.

At some point, it’s important to recognize that rankings for the sake of rankings are a wasted effort. Furthermore, good rankings built upon a foundation of low-quality links from within an easily identifiable network of partner sites will be short-lived at best. The goal of every forward-thinking publisher should be to build sites that are *not* solely dependent on search engine traffic. If you have top rankings for competitive keywords, and you still haven’t managed to acquire a self-reinforcing market position, you probably don’t deserve the rankings you’ve acquired in the first place.

I don’t consider myself a rockstar SEO on the level of @graywolf or @gregboser or @davenaylor or @aaronwall, but I’ve been in the trenches long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Trying to build a sustainable, profitable business on a short-sighted SEO strategy is a recipe for failure, plain and simple. If I owned the sites referenced above, my primary focus would be on converting my existing visitors into proper customers. In many cases, publishers do not need higher rankings and more traffic. They simply have to adapt their mindset to focus on conversion. Ciao for now, folks!

“Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

So how do these ideas relate to the world we live in as publishers, marketers, advertisers, etc?  Let’s break it down a little bit and examine a few key phrases.

1. “to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences”

2. “influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning”

3. “resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives”

The first statement hints at the practice of content creation and promotion, more commonly known as “getting the word out”.  Obviously this can be accomplished a number of different ways on teh internetz, but you get the idea.  The second statement suggests that the goal of content promotion is ultimately to influence behavior.  Everyone and anyone that promotes a message has an agenda and in most cases, it is an attempt to influence an action of some sort.  The third point infers that the motivation to influence behavior through content promotion is to produce an end result favourable to the broader objectives of the initiator.  This is called conversion.  This is the stage at which the goal of the agenda has been realized.

As I researched further, I was amused to discover the many parallels that exist between marketing strategy and military strategy.  What they call disinformation, we call public relations.  What they call psy ops, we call advertising.  I have a lot more research to do before I can speak with any great authority on the issue, but there is no doubt in my mind that internet marketing, digital pr, etc. are just slightly differing forms of information warfare.  If you’re interested in researching further, I would recommend checking out this recently declassified document entitled “Regaining the High Ground:  The Challenges of Perception Management in National Strategy and Military Operations.”  We are at war, people.