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Recently, Sebastian suggested that paid link sellers could switch their business model by secretly no following links. That is, making the paid links look like they “follow” except when viewed by Google’s spiders. These type of links would be called “cloaked nofollows”.

As it happens, I thought about this strategy way back when I wrote How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Sebastian’s article discussed the “pro” side of this cloaking nofollows on paid links. I’m going to discuss the “cons”.

But first, a bit of nuts and bolts.

Is it possible to cloak nofollows?!

Absolutely! It is entirely possible to deliver one page to the Googlebot and another to human visitors. I discuss how to deliver cloaked nofollow entire pages in How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Should you wish to delve deeper into the subject; I recommend reading Sebastian’s and Tellin’ Ya’s articles.

If you were to want to cloak nofollows with WordPress, you would likely do it using a plugin you could use as linkbait, right?

Here are 6 reasons why I wouldn’t write a plugin to cloak nofollowed paid links!

I’m placing the ones I think most important at the top.

1. Unethical: Fraud.
   Let’s say you enter a contractual agreement with someone. You told them would provide them with “X”, they paid you “$Y”. They pay you. And then, you don’t provide what you agreed to provide. You obtained money under false pretenses: That’s fraud.
2. Legal Woes: Users would get sued.
   In most countries, contracts for services are legally binding. If you violate a legal contract, the customer can sue. If they can prove their case, they will win. No judge is going to buy, “But I was just using a publicly available plugin” as a defense.
3. Poor Business Practice: You’ll eventually lose customers.
   Ok, lets say you aren’t worried about being sued. You live in west-soutwest-outer-Slobobia, beyond the reach of the law.

   Guess what? It turns out some decent SEO companies actually test to determine whether your links pass page rank. Do you think the engineers at Pay Per Post aren’t going to be offering a service like this within a year? Do you think V7N doesn’t already do it?

4. Uses excess CPU.
   In comments, Lord Matt noted that delivering cloaked pages requires coding to detect who the visitor is, processing that, and then delivering different pages based on the result. This requires a some amount of CPU; if done properly, the load might be acceptable. If done improperly, it could suck mega-cpu.
5. Error prone: Users might sue me!
   Honestly, I don’t trust myself to think of all the failure modes for a plugin designed to defraud customers. Will it work with caching? Will it work with widgets? With WP 2.2? WP 2.3? WP 2.3.x? With the “Bizarrely written yet somehow beautiful” theme?
6. We don’t know how Google would react to this.
   Google will know you are posting cloaked nofollows. Who is to say Google won’t suspect someone cloaking nofollowed paid links of also posting followed paid links?

My advice: Don’t cloak-nofollow paid links.

Cloaking your no-follow paid links sounds clever. I suspect some will do it. Maybe if you are very,very, very clever, you will succeed. For my part: I won’t do it, or write a plugin to do it, because it’s unethical. But, even if it weren’t, I know I’d screw it all up and burn myself.

In the final analysis: either you think followed paid links are ok, or you don’t. Either you risk your page rank accepting money to post followed paid links, or you don’t. But accepting the money and then publishing cloaked nofollowed paid links? That’s just not right.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 11:42 am and is filed under Blogging, Link Building, Links, Plugins, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.