Scroll Cloaking : Simple and Effective Cloaking
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.
