digitalghost - 9:35 pm on Feb 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

I always find it humorous when someone that has never cloaked a site tries to define it. This thread has been hilarious.

Jill, all you ended up doing was agreeing with everyone that "said doesn't matter what you think, it is the engine's definition that we have to live with.

>>but true cloaking (as Alan has defined it) is not fine because it's an attempt to trick the search engines

What? I don't think there are many folks out there that cloak to "deceive" the engines, what's the point? Clients that hire someone to cloak their site aren't doing it so they can deceive the engines or deceive the surfer. 99% of them want to cloak a site to overcome design limitations.

If someone hands me a multiple framed, heavily scripted site and they want better ranking they don't want me to send the surfers to pages about apples while I send the bots to pages about oranges. They want me to strip all the junk code out of the page the spider visits. Guess what? The text on both pages will be the same. Deceptive? Hardly. Effective? Yes. Do the engines think it is okay? No. They call that cloaking.

>>Google does take the lead on this, which is why they happen to have the best results

Again, What? Google has the best results because they say "don't cloak"? What does that statement have to do with the quality of the results? All the engines could add that little snippet of text tomorrow and a year later the quality of their SERPS would still be the same, unless those engines change the quality of their algorithm.

I think you're still operating under the assumption that people cloak a site to target cotton candy for the bots then feed the surfers a page about phentermine. Doesn't happen that way unless the person cloaking the site is a complete dolt.

Cloaking isn't a magic bullet. The optimization has to be as good or better as that of pages that aren't cloaked. Cloaked pages are typically focused and relevant. If the cloaked page is created by an SEO they are generally optimized quite well but cloaking just overcomes the SE's inability to handle certain technologies. Cloaking is also used frequently to overcome poor design considerations. What cloakers aren't doing is feeding pages about entirely different subject matter to the bots and the end-user.

All you've done is make it seem as if UA delivery is fine while IP delivery is taboo. Some poor webmaster out there will now cloak using UA delivery and get bounced because Google doesn't like UA delivery either.