Air - 12:51 am on Oct 31, 2000 (gmt 0)

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Alan.

You make some compelling arguements, and very well.

>But one thing's for sure: savvy page jackers and copyright thieves will, themselves, always be cloakers.

Yes it is unfortunate, but you are right, well ranking pages that are stolen are often subsequently cloaked by the page-jacker.

I am unclear on whether you are suggesting that both cloaking and SEO reverse engineering are a manipulation of the search engines' algorithm, do I read that correctly?

On the subject of cloaked authoratative links, I can suggest what I do when cloaking. I always place a link on both the cloaked page and the human visible one.

>But if they cloak, why should they link back to you on their cloaked pages?
Well, because it's the right thing to do, and because any SEO worth their salt will immediately know that they are not receiving credit for the link in the search engines.

>The challenge to Mikkel and other search engines is to be better so that those SEOs who find cloaking to be essential now will not find it to be so in future. Advocating universal cloaking is not the answer, it's surrender.:)

Very well said, IMO it is only through the dialogue that is being contemplated between SEO's and the Search Engines that this can happen. It just so happens that cloaking is providing that impetus. Any solution that advocates universal cloaking is not the answer.