jdMorgan - 6:39 pm on Aug 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

That depends on whether you're cloaking for "good" reasons -- with no intent to deceive potential visitors, or cloaking for "bad" reasons -- with the search engines deciding what is "good" and what is "bad."

If you are cloaking for "bad" reasons, it also depends on how sophisticated your techniques are -- For example, it is necessary to keep up with all IP addresses belonging to the search engines, and to be able to detect bot-like activity on your site and respond to it.

But as for general cloaking, I'd have to say that there are many, many successful sites on the Web that are cloaking in one way or another. Every site I have ever built is cloaked to some extent, for the simple purpose of providing alternate but equivalent content to text-only robots. The result is that the robots accurately interpret what my pages are about, without tripping over information presented with technologies that they cannot yet fully interpret, such as flash.

The word "cloaking," like the word "proxy," is value-neutral when it stands alone. Either can be good or bad, depending on the context.

New sites typically get a boost in the SERPs, usually for a month or so. However, once they have been spidered and their ranking scores have been calculated, the pages then assume the position in the search results indicated by that ranking evaluation. I'd look to other factors unless your cloaking is thinly-done and is intentionally deceptive.

Jim