Cloaking is not a personal favorite of mine as i would rather have the visitor see my pages but it is very successful if you have the right software and a bit of ip delivery knowledge.

As i don't really exploit clocking to its fullest potential, this is just a quick overview of how it works and why you would use it.

I have asked a few different webmasters who i know actively persue clocking in a big way to do a small tutorial for me to post on the site. I will also include links to some of the more reliable programs and software to save you the trouble of searching for it.

The basis of cloaking is to show the search engines one keyword rich but very much visually unappealing site and to show the end user a nice presentable destination site.

This is something that many people do at the moment and was first made popular in the porn industry to redirect visitors to affiliate links without having to do a lot of seo or without making your site look visually correct.

I like the idea of this way of promoting sites to the search engines and you can have thousands of keyword rich pages all funneling to one highly visual and converting page or site.

THe question people ask is `will i get banned?` - the answer is `possibly` but if you look round the forums you can see a multitude of people that have been banned and weren't using anything as powerful as cloaking.

With cloaking, the strain on your server is minimal due to your pages having no images, formatting or content and only really exists if the bots hit you hard on their crawl so this also saves on bandwidth.

Cloaking is not for everybody and is very suited to a few niche industry's such affiliate and porn to mention just a few. It can be used for all sorts of sites and industry's but there is often other ways and is something i would say that the more `experienced black hats use.

There is a discussion about cloaking going on in the black hat forum