DaveAtIFG - 3:31 pm on May 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

I must agree with Brett in part. An older site (year and a half) that has been cloaked most of it's life has improved it's position on INK engines recently without cloaking. A newer site (six months and designed from the ground up to rank well, themes, keywords, etc) got listed well and immediately on INK without cloaking. An INK press release from a few months ago that included a bunch of statistics, "Number of cloaked sites detected" was one. Can't find the darn thing now though... My impression is that different INK partners penalize differently for cloaking.

Currently AV doesn't seem to be trying to detect cloaking that I've noticed. They are definitely not penalizing for discreet cloaking, optimizing a RELEVENT page, in my experience.

NL seems to be a mixed bag. It appears as if older pages in their index can cloak with impunity. New submissions appear to be checked for cloaking and penalized if detected.

I feel that as the major SEs become more sophisticated the value of cloaking will be further eroded. Fanto, don't get defensive. If you can remain ahead of the SEs technically, you may become a specialized service that an average cloaker will buy instead of DIY because it has become so labor intensive to keep up with the technology.

My own limited experience strongly suggests that links popularity carries substantially more weight then any page optimization cloaking provides with many of the major engines. I fully expect this to spread to all of the major SEs soon.

Another $.02