YoungstownWebMan - 1:17 pm on Aug 19, 2002 (gmt 0)

I recently attended the Search Engine Strategies 2002 conference in San Jose - my impression from the Search Engine representatives was that cloaking was OK given that it did not distort the user experience - that if used as a tool to allow the search engines to gather the relavent information it was OK.

They are not going to put anything in writing - and for the most part they do want to discourage this sort of thing because so many have abused it. But for instance most web sites cloak to some degree anyway - because cloaking is serving up different pages based on useragent. Most of the web sites I deal with server up different pages for IE, netscape 4.x, netscape 6, Lynx [text], or WAP [wireless phones]. When a spider's useragent is encountered, which version am I serving it? Probaly the most spider-friendly & search engine friendly pages.

So what I was told by a programmer from Google was that they look at sites which are being grossly deceptive, have keywords stuffed, have inbound links from link farms etc - those they will ban or lower the ranking for.

This is just my impression, but I heard it over and over again. The Search Engine's are mainly concerned with the user experience. Are your keyword phrases relevant to your content? Is your content something of value to the user?

Scott Emick
Webmaster, Programmer, Analyst
Younstown, OH