Search Illustrated: Black Hat Cloaking Explained

Have you ever clicked on a promising search result, only to find that the web page you land on has nothing to do with what you expected, or even worse, is a page of porn or other spam?

If so, you may have been the unwitting victim of black-hat cloaking. Today’s Search Illustrated shows how this bait-and-switch tactic is accomplished:

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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http://www.visionefx.net/ rickvidallon

I am curious if creating a sitemap using linking phrases for everypage that match the title tag is considered spamming or cloaking?

For example I found a website that ranked really high for the search phrase (real estate virginia beach). When I looked at the site index it had over a hundred links titled the same ((real estate virginia beach)) all linking to pages with the same title tag — but 99% of the pages linked to were only (loosely) connected to that term; such as schools, weather, resources and so on…

Thanks
rick@visionefx.net
OptimizingDK

First of all I would like to complement you on a very good illustration of how black hat cloaking works.

However I think it’s worth mentioning that black hat cloacking delivers more then spam and irrelevant results.

If you go beyond the fact that black hat cloaking is a viloation of the search engines guidelines, it can be an extremely powerful marketing tool. By ensuring that what you do is relevant for both the search engine user and the client, you create value for both.

I know a lot of you disagree but I would just like the coverage of black hat cloacking to be a little bit more nuanced.