Sneaky SEO: Cloaking your sitewide links
There is an interesting theory that too many site wide links might do more harm than good to your Google rankings. Site wide links are unnatural and while a few might be acceptable (blogroll links for example) if your links are mainly site wides then it is likely you have been violating the Google guidelines by buying links or using some other unnatural method designed to manipulate your Google rankings.
On the flip side we know that MSN and Yahoo love site wide links and sometimes a couple are enough to get you top rankings in a few weeks.
What can a sneaky SEO do?
Assuming that you have more than one website and are using site wide links from one site to help another there is a fun technique called cloaking that you can use.
Simply set up your site wide links so that you only show them to MSN and Yahoo and not to Googlebot and your normal visitors. This way you can’t get banned from Google for cloaking and you get site wide links and top rankings in MSN and Yahoo.
The risk is that MSN and Yahoo might ban your site but this is unlikely as long as they don’t know that you own both the websites.
If you really don’t want to get banned by Yahoo or MSN you could show the sitewide links to your visitors as well and just remove them for Googlebot.
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Of course if you do the second thing (show the links to everyone except googlebot) it might get your site banned by google
BTW google now uses real user agents some times in order to determine if you are cloacking (Matt Cutts had posted about that but I couldn’t find the post)
Wow. You just blew my mind. Cloaking, but not for users, and not for Google, but for Yahoo and MSN. Genius!
Great tip! I have a few sites that just recently seemed to get hit by this ‘penalty’. I am running a blog contest, and many bloggers are displaying a ‘Vote for Me’ button that we supplied. Many are putting this in their sidebar so it’s causing sitewide links… I’d like to fix that.
What do you feel is the best method/technique/script for this type of ‘link cloaking’ – please supply example.
This blog is just full of dubious tips.
Really curious if too many links to outside sites is a bad thing? I’ve got about 6500 blog posts and 25,000 links to outside sites and about to submit the site to google. WE’LL SEE. Just hope that I don’t end up having to restart on another ip address because they think it’s overkill. Trying to build a good site, that’s all.
How can you have 6500 blog posts and not already be indexed in Google? Why would you link to 4 sites in every single blog post anyway?
Not a fan of site-wide links anymore. I’ve removed most of ours on the blog and have noticed no change in rankings.
Also isn’t hiding stuff to different search engines a bit on the edge?
what about site wide links on the same site?
i mean a list of my popular articles on my site that appear in the side bar for example?