Way back when, “link cloaking” referred to a Black Hat SEO technique (a way to get high rankings on search engines). I won’t go into the technical details, but basically the web page sends different information to the visitor based on who they are. In short, if the server detects that you are Googlebot (Google’s search indexing system which ranks content relevance) it displays “nice” information. This “nice” information would rank well, and consequently the site would be one of the first ones displayed in the search results). However, if the server detects that it is a human (i.e. you!), it displays “other” information (usually trying to sell you something). While an interesting topic in itself, that’s not what this post is about

Originally known as “affiliate link cloaking”, it has now replaced the Black Hat SEO technique as the assumed definition of “link cloaking”. As an example:

• This is an uncloaked link to Google
• This is a cloaked link to Google

If you click on the links above, both will take you to www.google.com.
But you’ll notice that the cloaked link doesn’t display the same information on the bottom-left of your browser.

There are many reasons why someone might want to cloak a link. The most common reason is for affiliate sales (where the affiliate gets a commission if they refer someone who ultimately makes a purchase). Under these circumstances, link cloaking does the following:

• Obscures the sale (so that you might not immediately know that you’re going to be buying widgets from company XYZ, until you actually click on the link and go to the XYZ’s site).
• Prevents you from “bypassing” the affiliate (where you remove the affiliate’s code and go “directly” to XYZ’s website). Doing so won’t actually save you any money. But because the seller won’t know which affiliate referred you, the affiliate loses out on the commision.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the code of my link.php file.

<?php
$path = array(
'123' => 'http://www.google.com'
);
$key = htmlspecialchars($_GET['key']);
if (array_key_exists($_GET['id'],$path))
header(’Location:’.$path[$_GET['id']]);
?>

Basically, this file compares the ID paramter (e.g. www.wandering.net/link.php?id=123) against the array. If a match exists (”123″ in this case), then it uses the PHP Header Location call to redirect the browser (”www.google.com” in this case).

To use, just change the HTML A (link code) from

<a href=”http://www.google.com”>This is an uncloaked link to Google</a>

to

<a href=”http://www.wandering.net/link.php?id=123″>This is a cloaked link to Google</a>

Simple

The simple act of registering a domain opens yourself up to alot of privacy issues. In it’s basic form, it allows people to harvest your email address for spamming. It doesn’t take alot of imagination to figure out how much further hackers can take it (socially-engineered hacking, identity theft, etc).

As demonstration of how readily available this information is, let’s look at who owns wandering.com. You’ll see that it is registered to Murat in Istanbul with his Yahoo email address, phone and fax numbers. Compare that to wandering.net’s records. All my details are hidden behind NameCheap’s WhoisGuard. I’m sure that my information is not perfectly secure, but at least it’s an added layer of protection.

I always get similar privacy protection for all domains that I register. When I was with GoDaddy I used their “Domains By Proxy” service (an “added value” aka “charge you more money” service). NameCheap’s WhoisGuard is free (for now). It doesn’t matter who you register with, but I’d always recommend buying the privacy service (now you know why)!

There are alot of opinions on the best TLD (Top Level Domain name) to use when registering domain names. Alot of people say .COM’s are best, although there seems to be an increasing minority that says TLDs don’t matter so why not use the much cheaper .INFO domains.

After researching into this subject, what I learnt is this:

• If you have to tell people your domain name (e.g. what your email address is), then .COM is definitely the best. Everyone knows what .COM is.
• If you’re using SEO (Seeach Engine Optimization) to get listed on search engines, it doesn’t matter what TLD you use. It has been suggested that .ORG and .EDU domains seem to get better quality scores and thus should be listed higher up in search results.
• Especially if you’re doing direct advertising (e.g. Google Adwords) and don’t expect alot of word-of-mouth marketing, then it definitely doesn’t matter what TLD you use (and you should use the cheapest TLD that fits with your marketing campaign).

As such, I’m big proponent of buying .INFO domains. I figure they’re cheap, they can be SEO just fine, and as long as I have a .COM (or in this case a .NET) email address to tell people, I’m good to go!

As a long-time fan of Internet Explorer (the only browser I’ve used since NCSA Mosaic!), I’d been looking forward to IE7. I’ve always figured that being made by Microsoft (let’s just ignore the political views of the company for a second), IE should integrate better into the Windows OS and have wider support (with all the Microsoft IIS web servers out there).

When IE7 came out ~2 months ago, I discovered that it broke a few sites I was developing (wandering.net being one of them). I spent a few hours “working around” the problem (couldn’t “fix” it because IE wasn’t handling the XHTML code properly). That forced me to install Firefox, in order to check that my IE fixes were working properly in Firefox.

As I used Firefox more and more, I quickly recognized that it was superior to IE (and even IE7) in many usability functions. Some people say Firefox is faster (I can’t tell the difference on my broadband connection), but the small nuances really stand out. One of my particular favorite, is when you start typing a URL into the address bar. IE will list the matching sites in alphabetical order, but Firefox will list the matching sites based on how often you access them. So in Firefox, when I start typing “google.com”, it will list “google.com/analytics” followed by “google.com/adsense” (because I go to “analytics” more often than I go to “adsense”).

One more (belated) convert to Firefox!

Because of all this, I have been paying more attention to “visitor browser information” on my site statistics (e.g. Google Analytics & awstats). I was pretty amazed at on most of my sites, Firefox commanded >40% of the visitors (and on some sites, ranked as high as 80%).

Yes, we all know sex sells. And more often than not, it just seems like the Internet is used for porn. But it’s never really struck home about how much drawing power sex has until about a week ago…

I started TubeBattle as a new mashup: video sharing (a la YouTube), community-driven content & rating (a la Digg). Even as I write this, TubeBattle is the only site of its kind. I’m sure someone out there is busily copying the idea, but that’s OK because I’ve got developers working to some kick-ass new features ;).

TubeBattle’s growth has been pleasantly surprising, quickly gaining a strong user-base. I’ve introduced new and interesting battles for people to participate in, such as:

• Top rated videos from YouTube, Digg and TubeBattle users
• Viral videos that people are talking about on blogs
• Movie trailers
• Music Videos

TubeBattle has the ability for users to leave feedback, and I kept getting requests to apply the battle format to sexy videos. I was undecided for a long time, unsure whether I wanted TubeBattle to go in this direction…

Going back to the basic tenent of TubeBattle’s philosophies (that it’s a community-driven engine), I created the Sexy Videos battle. And in just under a week, we’ve blown past 1,600 votes for that battle (and surpassed 5,000 votes today, it’s 9th day of existance). The number of votes cast each day has been increasing, and traffic to the site has broken previous records.

So coming back to the “business lessons” learnt here:

• Start with a philosophy for whatever you do (work, website, etc) and let it guide you - don’t change mid-stream.
• If you’re in “business”, then take yourself out of the equation - sell what buyers wants, not what you want them to buy
• Many people use the Internet for many things. But the bulk of it is for sex stuff

There are many personal ironies in the fact that I’m learning about this reality now… one of which is that I work and live in Las Vegas!