Brett_Tabke - 4:05 pm on Jun 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

I've kept just a touch of cloaking for a specific engine; but, I've given up on the big two (alta/ink).

I just don't trust Alta not to screw around. I've checked and checked the close competition on alta, and the top sites also appear not to be cloaking, or they have gotten very good at it. why? They've certainly done something over there to atleast shake out the amature cloakers - you rarely get those various styles of redirects to base pages anymore from top-of-the-results page sites. I think it is indicative that they have cross referenced data from somewhere. Either from their own spiders or cross referencing data with dec's Mercator.
Futher down in the results I still can find a few redirects (a minor indicator of cloaking activity).

Ink? Little doubt that they are running shawdow spiders. They are xreferencing that data from somewhere. I think they are pulling data out of proxy caches from all those cache servers they own, lease, or operate for others like AOL (it is ink's pcache software running on aol). Our cloaked sites went doa in March. Turned off the cloak, and finally back into some decent rankings again (decent defined as top 50).

I've went back to cloaking for Fast at the moment. Don't know if that will last, but with Lycos now using Fast, I wanted to play hard. I just feel there is more untapped potential in Lycos and I wanted to get ready.

There is going to be a day here sometime this summer when Lycos drips with traffic again. The word about Fast/Lycos is slowly trickling out. As these things usually go, sooner-or-later, one of the big news outlets is going to pick it up and *bam*, mega traffic at Lycos. Lycos also has all that stuff going on in Europe with Terra and Fast, I want to be ready for those days.

Ya, I've always tried to ride the waves. Like the old Infoseek. I used to run a news and current events site when Infoseek was indexing instantly. That gave me a good insight into how people surf in mass on the spur of the moment. That is why I was ready when alta did the switch last year, why I played Google hard when they were getting all the free press, and Excite when @home took over. I just want to be ready for Lycos when it finally 'pops'.

I have a couple of pages still cloaked for Ink of data I don't want exposed but need the link reference.
I don't think I'll ever go back to cloaking on the big two (or excite). Never really cared for it in the first place.