jeremy_goodrich - 5:04 pm on May 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

(most of this is a bit off topic.....but.....)

If 10,000 servers (google) can't do it...what engine has more computing power?

And, I'm sure you recall the infamous Inktomi debacle, Mikkel. I worked for firms that were on that list. It was compiled by hand and not by spiders and as far as I've seen in the US market, they have been the most 'gung ho' in hunting down massive cloakers.

Aside from that, I'm sure you are aware many, many SEO's have software which build pages on the fly, from datbases of related content, to produce human readable sentences, phrases, and entire sites, complete with links, which seem a little garbled, BUT, couldn't be determined when spidered if it was written by a person or software.

Now, aside from the AI implications of such a system, if they really had some 'intelligent spidering methodologies' then I would think they'd sell that, and get out of the search engine business ( again, that's something, judging by most US corporations, that doesn't look too profitable).

Getting back to topic, to cloak or not to cloak, I for one don't do it for Google anymore. Last time I did it, the company I work for made plenty of money, and the pages never got kicked out (they're still in there, 4 months later) but the ROI isn't nearly as great as a site which is well optimized from the ground up, and has both spider and human content.

The more content you have on a page, the better, for Google, because of the full text indexing that they do...and the cloaked pages I always built didn't have many 'fuzzy keyword combos' which can pull in a lot of bonus traffic.