Experienced affiliate marketers always find ways to solve work-related issues, especially when it directly affects their earnings. Unfortunately or fortunately, these paths do not always lead to honest and legal methods. However, if something important exists in this turbulent world of affiliate marketing, we must definitely tell you about it. Today, we introduce you to the concept of “Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing” and delve into its necessity and functionality. In short, it’s a content substitution method. Haven’t heard of it? Be sure to read on to be able to use this important tool in your work to improve results.
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What is cloaking?
Cloaking is a website search optimization method that is considered a black-hat technique. This term comes from the English word “to cloak,” meaning “to disguise, to hide.” The essence of this tool lies in hiding one content and showing another depending on who requests the content.
An important advantage of using cloaking is that the site you promote rises in the search engine rankings faster than usual. Since the necessary users see the relevant offers and respond well to them, while others receive already optimized pages in the search results.
It can be conditionally divided into white, gray, and black. White cloaking involves dividing users into different categories according to their geolocation and interests and filtering out fraudulent traffic. Gray cloaking deceives the admins specifically, while potential clients receive the correct information. Black cloaking is more complicated: it involves deceiving all parties, including clients, affiliate networks, and moderators.
Why hide content and from whom?
This tool is used by affiliate marketers to work with gray and black offers where it is prohibited but profitable. For example, Meta does not allow advertising for gambling, adult content, crypto, and other verticals that bring good earnings. But we understand that this platform has a huge number of potential clients for these niches. Therefore, you have to choose: look for other traffic sources or go the route of confusing the system and pour traffic on the desired profitable offers.
Obviously, most choose the latter option, as a quality multi-million audience is not found just lying around. Then, cloaking enters the ring as an important tool for promoting prohibited products.
In addition to deceiving AI of popular social networks, some affiliate marketers also hide from advertisers to ensure traffic from prohibited sources is not detected. Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing also deceives CPA networks, spy services, and, in fact, your colleagues. This is done so that all your work, including creatives and well-functioning tricks, cannot be tracked and analyzed.
Now, let’s delve into the mechanics of cloaking.
If you are hearing about it for the first time, do not be afraid and immediately refuse due to ignorance and fear of the new. Technological development is constant, and it is now possible to involve new tools in work without titanic efforts, using ready-made scripts and convenient services.
How does it work? You specify the necessary settings in the chosen service so that it understands how to split the traffic, and then its unique scripts analyze all requests. The program shows the appropriate content depending on who made the request. The target audience sees the desired content that was hidden from others, while others see an already optimized page.
Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing has three components: white page, black page, and a service for cloaking.
“White page” is the optimized version of the page that will be seen by moderators and other undesirable users. It is cleaned from prohibited elements and suspicious links that could prevent successful moderation. “Black page” is the offer page that the potential client will see. It must contain all the necessary information that will compel the user to perform the action you need.
How are users identified?
There are two main methods: by User-agent parameter and IP address.
When working by the User-agent method, the name of the search engine’s robot is entered, the script searches for this name in the database, and depending on the search result, either an optimized page or the page with your offer for the target user is displayed.
In the second option, the script checks all IP addresses of site visitors. It’s simple: if you are interested in users from Ukraine, for example, the script filters out all those whose address belongs to other countries. Thus, undesirable users will not see the offer.
Risks of using Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing.
It’s important to understand that all three components affect the success of the work. It’s worth not only relying on scripts but also paying attention to the preparation of landing pages. Of course, simple scripts have fewer capabilities than cloaking services, but you can try at least them to understand the mechanism. Also, pay attention to the use of domains to only use those that have not yet been banned.
Almost all search engines are against cloaking. They perceive it as spam that deteriorates their functioning, so they try to promote resources with quality, relevant content. Because of this, your site may receive a ban and disappear from the first pages of search results.
Often, the content on the optimized page and the page for the user differs significantly, the robot sees different content, so the user receives a search result that does not meet their needs at all.
Advertising networks, like search engines, ruthlessly ban for using cloaking. Specialists continuously refine methods of its detection, making it harder to hide and substitute content and offers.
Popular services for Cloaking in Affiliate Marketing.
On our media’s website, we have a separate section with services for various needs like cloaking or antidetect, which we periodically update. Go ahead and learn useful information by following this link.
Often, services offer not only cloaking but also a large number of useful features for both affiliate marketers and marketers. Here are a few of the most popular cloaks:
Cloak It — a cloud-based cloaking with a simple interface. A/B testing, the ability to work with VPN and proxies, all types of integrations (PHP, JavaScript, IOS, Android, WordPress), a wide database of bots, support for various advertising sources and platforms.
Zeustrack — also a cloud service with a large blacklist of IP addresses of robots and moderators of search systems, unwanted visitors, etc. Own analytics for counting clicks, CR, CTR, multi-user mode available, trial period offered.
Keitaro — a service for professionals. Besides cloaking, there are many other traffic management capabilities.
NolpFraud — a service for marketers and affiliate marketers that detects fraudulent traffic and cloaking. Suitable for any traffic sources and offers flexible filtering.
If you want quick results, understanding the mechanics of cloaking is worthwhile. Analyze the available services and ensure which specific tools need to be incorporated into the process. To increase your earnings, you must always stay informed and learn new tricks to optimize your work.
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With care, your Geek!
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