When I was a kid, cloak and dagger games were always a favorite. Pretending to be someone else, disguising yourself, all harmless fun at a young age. Harry Potter took it a step further, he even has a cloak that can turn him completely invisible!
Unfortunately we are not here to talk about science fiction or childhood fantasy. The online marketing world is also very familiar with cloaking. However, it has become far more sinister than an adolescent mind could conjure up.
Most consumers probably believe that the search engines are policing most of the content that is displayed in their search results. It is this belief that allows marketers to use cloaking to show consumers otherwise unapproved content on the first page of the search results.
To see how cloaking actually works, we need to first review how a search engine actually verifies the content it is displaying in the search results. There is no way to manually review the billions and billions of pages that a search engine indexes daily. So to perform these massive reviews the search engines use bots to automate this process.
Unfortunately, the use of an automated bot is exactly what allows unscrupulous marketers to trick the search engines and get otherwise unapproved content to appear in your search results. With a simple line of code or two, marketers can identify whenever a bot is coming to their website versus a real live person. Using the ability to identify that it is a review bot, they can display that review bot a completely different page of content with fully approved text and graphics. The bot takes a peek, thinks all is well and goes on to the next page. When a real live visitor comes to this same page they are displayed the real marketing content full of tricks and graphics that the search engine would normally ban outright.
Why would a marketer need to trick a search engine? Perhaps not surprisingly, that unapproved content can be precisely what sways the consumer to order a product or service based on false promises or unethical advertising. Cloaking lets the marketer avoid a shutdown of their site while continuing to show the highest converting, unapproved content.
Looking at a real world example, cloaking has become common in the work at home and diet marketing niches. The reason it is so common is that the search engines have identified this type of content as very likely to be utilizing unapproved material to make the sale. Rather than working on creating high quality approved content, the lazy marketer takes the short cut and uses high converting tricks and fake content to keep conversions high while they cloak the search engines.
In the work at home industry, this commonly results in the use of fake news sites or farticles. The content and style of these pages is completely against the policies and procedures of the search engines however on a recent check we found no fewer than 5 of this style of website not only listed in the organic search results but also in the paid keyword advertising column as well.
How does this affect the consumer? You should expect a certain amount of trust and transparency in the search results you are shown. After all, the search engines ban this type of content because they do not feel that it adds to the user experience they strive for. The result of cloaking is usually that the consumer feels burned by their purchase once they realize that the endorsement or advertisement they were sold on should never have been shown to them.
Our advice, as always, is buyer beware! Those front page search results are only one or two lines of programming code away from being manipulated to make you react in a certain way. Always double check the website you are on after you click on a search result to ensure that it matches closely with what you were looking for.
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