Alan_Perkins - 11:43 pm on Feb 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

Cloaking: Delivering different content to SE's than Users.

Agreed. So read the first post in this thread again. Most of what is discussed there has nothing to do with search engines. So it cannot be cloaking, IMO.

Cloaking involves deliberately hiding from SEs the content that users see. This means the SEs cannot factor that content into their ranking algorithms. It should be clear why an engine with any respect for its algorithms would have a problem with this, no matter how closely the content that is delivered is related to the content that is cloaked. That is why some engines say "Don't cloak".

Some quotes from the SE webmaster and spam pages ...

Google Quality Guidelines [google.com]: Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Google FAQ : "What is cloaking?" [google.com] : The term "cloaking" is used to describe a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.

Inktomi Content Guidelines [inktomi.com] : [Unwanted Pages include] Pages that give the search engine a different page than the public sees (cloaking)

Inktomi Spam FAQ [inktomi.com] : Q: Is cloaking permitted?
A: No.

Inktomi Spam FAQ [inktomi.com] : Q: What if I present one page to Internet Explorer users, and a different page to Netscape users?
A: That's fine. If the purpose is to serve alternate pages to different human users, based on locality, browser, machine type etc., we do not consider that cloaking.