Cloaking Forum

If you must keep the cloaked pages on a separate domain you really can't benefit from the link pop established by the primary domain. The way to handle duplication is to redirect the regular non spider visitors to a target page on the real domain. The spiders on the other hand will only spider the cloaked pages and never see the redirects, since the redirects will only be on the regular visitor pages. This way the spiders do not encounter any duplicate pages.

By all means link the cloaked pages as you would a "real" site, that way the engines will follow links from one cloaked page to another. You can also help your link pop a little this way and avoid the orphaned page syndrome.

If you have multiple promotional domains you can enhance your linking strategy and increase link pop a little more by selectively linking them together, but you would need a fair number of pages and sites. Of course you'd also have to be careful not to dilute your "Keyword Center" through irrelevant linking.

Alternatively, you may want to develop the promotional domain into a themed cloaked site for some section of the main site and eventually lead visitors to the main site through a natural transition for more information or purchase. This may allow the promotional site to stand on it's own and develop some external links from directories etc.

"The way to handle duplication is to redirect the regular non spider visitors to a target page on the real domain. The spiders on the other hand will only spider the cloaked pages and never see the redirects, since the redirects will only be on the regular visitor pages. This way the spiders do not encounter any duplicate pages."

Yes - this is what I'm doing. Visitors get sent to the target domain, spiders stay within the cloaked domain.

"By all means link the cloaked pages as you would a "real" site, that way the engines will follow links from one cloaked page to another. You can also help your link pop a little this way and avoid the orphaned page syndrome."

Great - yes, doing that as well

"If you have multiple promotional domains you can enhance your linking strategy and increase link pop a little more by selectively linking them together, but you would need a fair number of pages and sites. Of course you'd also have to be careful not to dilute your "Keyword Center" through irrelevant linking."

OK. Will give this some thought. Could I place links in the real domain pointing back to static, uncloaked pages on the cloaked domain (if that makes sense)? This way, some pages on the cloaked domain will gain legitimate link-pop?

"Alternatively, you may want to develop the promotional domain into a themed cloaked site for some section of the main site and eventually lead visitors to the main site through a natural transition for more information or purchase. This may allow the promotional site to stand on it's own and develop some external links from directories etc. "

Very good. I'll try that out too

"Many do fine with just redirecting human visitors to the real site from a cloaked promotional domain, you may want to begin with that approach before getting into the more labor intensive alternatives and see how you do. That's what I'd do anyway."

Air - thanks for the clarification. My main reasons for not cloaking the main site are:

a) our server operations won't the Perl scripts I'm using
b) the target domain needs to be protected in case of banning

I don't tend to operate in very competitive
keyword areas, so perhaps link pop may not be so important for me?

>>>I don't tend to operate in very competitive
keyword areas,