With the time-delay cloaking method, a webmaster will partially render the page so that the ads at the top of the page show by themselves to users long enough to get a click and not get distracted by content. Lets face it, a page with nothing but ads on it has fantastic CTR without all that pesky content getting in the way.

Time-Delay cloaking isn’t actually ‘cloaking’ and webmasters have plausible deniability that it’s just a wonky server, or a slow connection, or perhaps just how the script hits a slow database. Eventually the content loads, and no one is hurt.

Big Benefits

A delay of 6-10 seconds can double an advertisement’s CTR… or more. The actual improvement, of course, depends upon a lot of things. Just a few seconds of delay can have a measurable affect on click throughs. When the advertisement is Adsense or another remotely hosted ad network, the delay may be even longer so that the remote script has time to load and render. Time-delay cloaking can go a long way to make sure that advertisers aren’t ignored while still giving users what they came for.

Credit CNet

I first noticed this type of cloaking back in 1998 on CNET. At the time, I think it was unintentional, but perhaps I don’t give them enough credit. Their implementation involved a flaw in browsers at the time that would wait to render parts of a table until all the content loaded. They would put their ads at the top of the page in a separate table, and it would render as soon as you hit the page. The rest of the page would follow a few seconds later or more, depending on your connection speed.

Implementation

Implementation is fairly straightforward. In PHP the simple implementation:

<?
echo $yourHeader;
echo $yourAd;

sleep( 5+rand(4,8) );

echo $restOfYourPage;
?>
** you may or may not have to flush the output buffer.

In some cases, you could also put a slow loading remote script with a document.write(). There are many more ways to implement this, and I encourage you to be creative and let us know what you come up with.

Some Tips

Make sure you remove the delay for any bots as this can reduce your crawling rate, or worse. I’m not sure how the search engines may see this, but that alone is a sure sign that you should proceed with caution. Some tips for using this method:

- Randomize the delay time so it’s not obvious what you are doing
- Don’t delay for bots – you may get reduced crawling or worse
- Don’t over do it – if you delay too long, do you really have content?
- Only delay once per user per day to avoid reverse engineers

Disclaimer

Cloaking of any kind may risk your search engine rankings. I don’t endorse this technique, nor do I recommend it to anyone that hasn’t evaluated the risks. In general a site should cater to what is good for their users. When in doubt, ask for help.

Happy Cloaking.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Scroll Cloaking as Implemented a Forum

Cloaking, in the search marketing sense, is a technique where you show different pages to the Search Engine bot than you do to your users. Marketers do this for a variety of reasons, but most often to show keyword rich content to the search engines that would look unnatural to a human. Often cloaking is more or less a bait-and-switch tactic, although it does have quite a few legitimate uses such as geographic specific content.

Scroll Cloaking

One type of cloaking that I find to be particularly clever and easy to implement is what I call ‘Scroll Cloaking’. Scroll Cloaking was pioneered by a site featured in the image to the left that I will not name. It is a forum that makes money by answering technical questions for it’s paying members. Most developers I’ve talked to absolutely despise this site because they appear to offer only the question and not the answer, and are ranked for thousands and thousands of technical search terms on Google. They try to get you to buy a subscription to get the answer, and I know more than one frustrated person that has ponied up the cash without realizing they could just scroll to the bottom of the page (albeit sometimes as much as 5000 pixels).

Why Do This?

Like most cloaking, scroll cloaking allows you to put content on the page for the search engines that you don’t want your users to see. In most cases, it’s keyword stuffed gibberish. In other cases, it’s content that you need for SEO, but content you don’t want the user to get without paying. Scroll Cloaking allows you to do this, at least for a large percentage of users, while still being able to claim to search engineers that you are not hiding content – because it’s still on the page and visible.

Seemingly Low Google Risk

Given the length of time and exposure the forum site has gotten for this technique without being banned or penalized leads many to assume it is Google approved.   Technically speaking, it’s not really cloaking because the user is actually presented the content, it’s just hidden by 4-5 scrolls that most users don’t realize. There are other such cloaking techniques that I will highlight in the coming articles of this series.

Easy to Implement
Scroll cloaking is one of the easiest types of cloaking to implement.   Anyone can implement scroll cloaking with the following code:

<?
echo $advertisement;
for ( $i = 0; $i < 100; $i++ ) {
echo “<br>”;
}
echo $content;
?>

Disclaimer

I don’t endorse this technique, nor do I recommend it to anyone that hasn’t evaluated the risks. In general a site should cater to what is good for their users, and this certainly doesn’t qualify.

Happy cloaking.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

While googling myself this morning, I discovered a very strange thing. It seems that netflix pages were coming up very high on the ranking. I took a look at the cached version of these pages and noticed that Netflix was showing MY LOGIN in the cached page. The only way to do this would be to show Googlebot my login area. Checking further, I notice that it’s not just me, there are a large collection of Netflix customer’s private data exposed including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and even recent movies rented! The problem is not restricted to Google, but also cached pages in Yahoo! as well.

It seems user data from Netflix customers can be retrieved by the popular search engines Google and Yahoo by performing special queries reveiling a cached version of the page. This was discovered by OnlineMarketer.com on Friday. Judging by the cached date,the pages have been available as early as March 22nd.

The problem is not restricted to Google, but also cached pages in Yahoo! as well.

On some of the exposed pages see the users email and mailing address, as well as see what movies they have recently returned.

Cloaking Gone Bad
It appears that Netflix has been cloaking, serving different pages to search engine spiders than to users, and some error in their setup has exposed this data. Many popular sites cloak, including Google themselves, but normally to target geographically targeted pages to users such as their international versions. Whether this is a cloaking expiriment to try to game the search engines, or if this was just a mistake I’m not sure.

I’ve just returned “Run Lola Run”
That’s a page that I found in Yahoo. Indeed I did, and I liked it. Very good movie, but why is this available to Google and Yahoo?! Boy am I glad I don’t rent ADULT movies from netflix. The privacy violations are amazing at this point.

Mysterious Items in my Queue
Is Googlebot picking movies for me? My wife has been complaining about movies we’ve recently received and I thought nothing of them until now. From what I knew we had a near empty Queue, and now it is filled with a lot of random stuff. This is just speculation, but is in need of more invstigation.

One movie I see in Google’s cached version of my que, is “The Butterfly Effect”. Now I KNOW I didn’t put that there. For one, I have already rented it, and for another, the movie is one of the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

Ok, it seems this will turn up some of the Movies that Googlebot recommends and is adding to peoples’ queue.:

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:netflix+queue+add+site:netflix.com

- John

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.