Six Reasons I Won’t Cloaks Nofollows so Only Google Sees Them.
Recently, Sebastian suggested that paid link sellers could switch their business model by secretly no following links. That is, making the paid links look like they “follow” except when viewed by Google’s spiders. These type of links would be called “cloaked nofollows”.
As it happens, I thought about this strategy way back when I wrote How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Sebastian’s article discussed the “pro” side of this cloaking nofollows on paid links. I’m going to discuss the “cons”.
But first, a bit of nuts and bolts.
Is it possible to cloak nofollows?!
Absolutely! It is entirely possible to deliver one page to the Googlebot and another to human visitors. I discuss how to deliver cloaked nofollow entire pages in How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Should you wish to delve deeper into the subject; I recommend reading Sebastian’s and Tellin’ Ya’s articles.
If you were to want to cloak nofollows with Wordpress, you would likely do it using a plugin you could use as linkbait, right?
Here are 6 reasons why I wouldn’t write a plugin to cloak nofollowed paid links!
I’m placing the ones I think most important at the top.
- Unethical: Fraud.
Let’s say you enter a contractual agreement with someone. You told them would provide them with “X”, they paid you “$Y”. They pay you. And then, you don’t provide what you agreed to provide. You obtained money under false pretenses: That’s fraud. - Legal Woes: Users would get sued.
In most countries, contracts for services are legally binding. If you violate a legal contract, the customer can sue. If they can prove their case, they will win. No judge is going to buy, “But I was just using a publicly available plugin” as a defense. - Poor Business Practice: You’ll eventually lose customers.
Ok, lets say you aren’t worried about being sued. You live in west-soutwest-outer-Slobobia, beyond the reach of the law.Guess what? It turns out some decent SEO companies actually test to determine whether your links pass page rank. Do you think the engineers at Pay Per Post aren’t going to be offering a service like this within a year? Do you think V7N doesn’t already do it?
- Uses excess CPU.
In comments, Lord Matt noted that delivering cloaked pages requires coding to detect who the visitor is, processing that, and then delivering different pages based on the result. This requires a some amount of CPU; if done properly, the load might be acceptable. If done improperly, it could suck mega-cpu. - Error prone: Users might sue me!
Honestly, I don’t trust myself to think of all the failure modes for a plugin designed to defraud customers. Will it work with caching? Will it work with widgets? With WP 2.2? WP 2.3? WP 2.3.x? With the “Bizarrely written yet somehow beautiful” theme? - We don’t know how Google would react to this.
Google will know you are posting cloaked nofollows. Who is to say Google won’t suspect someone cloaking nofollowed paid links of also posting followed paid links?
My advice: Don’t cloak-nofollow paid links.
Cloaking your no-follow paid links sounds clever. I suspect some will do it. Maybe if you are very,very, very clever, you will succeed. For my part: I won’t do it, or write a plugin to do it, because it’s unethical. But, even if it weren’t, I know I’d screw it all up and burn myself.
In the final analysis: either you think followed paid links are ok, or you don’t. Either you risk your page rank accepting money to post followed paid links, or you don’t. But accepting the money and then publishing cloaked nofollowed paid links? That’s just not right.
Tags:Black Hat SEO cloaked nofollow cloaking nofollow paid links
Related Posts:
- How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles
- Ten Google Page Rank Haikus
- No Old Spam Links Plugin Updated: Can it salvage PR?
- Ten Useful Rules for Buying Paid Links: How to get good ROI for your campaign.
Comments
15 Responses to “Six Reasons I Won’t Cloaks Nofollows so Only Google Sees Them.”
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Lucia, in my article as well as in the comments I made it absolutely clear that I don’t support nofollow cloaking to cheat link buyers. I said full nofollow disclosure is a no-brainer. The (not exactly time consuming) method I suggested (user agent respectively referrer based cloaking) is not suitable to pass a link buyers review. Also, I provided a method to test it in the post. Of course IP delivery is the better method, technically spoken, but either a link buyer can check the search engine’s cached copy to detect the link condoms, or, if noarchive gets applied, the lack of a cached copy is a good reason not to buy a link for search engine juice.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with cloaked link condoms. If a site does it sneakily without disclosure, that’s the fault and responsibility of the cheating site, not the technology. Therefore you can’t get sued when you write the plugin, as long as you don’t advertise it for evil purposes.
Also, it’s not only for paid links, not all sites sell links you know, but most run ads which look plain ugly with the dotted border in firebrick.
The same goes for cross links within a network and other stuff which must be condomized for Google, but not for visitors.
Sebastian –I’m thinking mostly of writing plugins, which end up used by “the world”.
I agree that if the advertiser knows you are cloaking the nofollows, then it’s ok to nofollow and cloak those. It’s neither illegal nor immoral in that case.
If so, I have no problem with cloaking.
But, in my case, I write plugins for Wordpress. I just know that if I write one to permit bloggers do “cloak nofollow” in the post, that’s going to be used badly. I’m pretty sure fraud would be precisely the reason the plugin would be popular!
I also agree that if the plugin user were to sue me for representing this as a plugin that worked and then failed, they’d lose. But, frivolous suits are filed all the time in the US. Getting sued is inconvenient!:) (I don’t think the advertiser would ever even think to sue the plugin author. I think the plugin user might. )
I agree the links look ugly when pink. But cloak-nofollowing the ones in the sidebar, header etc. is actually a pesky task for a WP hook because the “hooks” aren’t always what you would hope for. It could be done, but it might need to be custom. If so, why make it a plugin? Just let everyone do a custom job.
Link buyers are supposed to buy traffic not link juice (so the theory says) and, Lucia, you don’t want Google overlords to hear what you say.
I’m 110% to cloaking external links but I’d rather do it shamelessly upfront.
PS: I have released a SEO tool for whoever cares.
@5ubliminal: Google says buyers are supposed to buy traffic not link juice. But that has nothing to do with any contractual obligation between a link buyer or seller.
I’ll go check out your SEO tool.
My general opinion is if you are going to nofollow an external link, you should be upfront. But…I’ve read your blog. I know better than to agree to ask you for a link exchange, you cloaked no-follow-link exchanger you!
I really think you should read my latest article. It’s fun and, as a woman, don’t take it the wrong way but Live Search is sort’of right about this …
Oh no! First you insult Scots.. and now…?
Now I go for women in general. Who knows who I’ll be onto next
(I have a list already…)
Sebastian, I don’t know you and I’m not here to start a fight, but if you don’t support nofollow cloaking, why would you show others how to do it??
Things like this are unethical and just plain wrong. When i see people giving advice on things like this I normally leave a comment with my thoughts, then leave and never come back. In certain cases, depending on what the topic is, I’ll warn my list, blog readers etc. to stay away from the person!
Giving any kind of advice on anything that is unethical is a great way lose the respect of your readers and ruin your business.
Wow, I didn’t even know that it was possible to cloak nofollow links! It seems that if I visit enough blogs, I can learn something new every day.
I also agree with your original assessment of the issue. The idea of cloaking nofollow links is getting a little too close to the “black hat” side of things for me, and with the ever-changing policies and algorithms of the search engines, it’s probably not worth the risk in the long run.
Something offtopic:
If you noticed I have a new account on sphinn as I got last one banned after mass messaging over 100 members a short while ago…
PS:It was fun!
@Karl: Yes, it is. I think it’s important to be aware of the issue and know how it may be used. Advertisers, in particular, need to be aware of it. That way, they can learn to do some testing to ensure they get what they pay for.
The other idea for Advertisers is they may just want to realize that if they pay “extra” for link juice, they may not get it. Focus on traffic or branding when buying ads.
[…] won’t be cloaking Nofollows so only Google sees them - Thanks […]
@Lucia:
Thank you for the tips. This is timely advice for me because lately I’ve been thinking about buying some text link ads. I really need the link juice because even though I managed to score a PR3 in the latest update, I still have approximately 80% of my pages in Google’s supplemental index. I’m currently getting an average of about 25 visits per day from search traffic, but with over 200 total pages, I know that I could really increase this figure if I could just get most of my pages out of the supplemental “dungeon”.
On the other hand, I have been reading a lot about Google cracking down on link selling sites and possibly devaluing their PageRank, so perhaps it would be better if I focused on getting more links for the traffic. It’s just so frustratingly slow…
@Karl: Yes, building backlinks is challenging. I’ve gotten a lot by writing plugins and then asking people to mention the plugins. That has the double effect of getting more people to use the plugin and getting me links.
It also helps to get in conversations with bloggers in your niche.
Wow! This is a nice and informative blog. Genuine link building is always tough but I guess cloaking no follows would do more harm to the sellers than good. When you put in some authority content, links do follow.