redzone - 6:03 am on Jul 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

I guess I'll come clean here, as I've never mentioned being involved with "cloaking" at SEF..

I've been cloaking for about 3.5 years now, have gone through 4 system "re-writes", and probably tried about everything... :)

We laugh about GreenFlash, cause they got a lot of bad press, while we continued to increase our client base, and have nice deposits at the bank... :)

Our current pathing methodology utilizes a root folder that only contains information for the root mirror domain, and then a subfolder inside the root folder, for "every" keyword we optimize for a client.

This keeps organization easy, and allows for complete automation of creating folders/files, rather than any type of manual file/folder creation.

Our first two Rev's were in Cold Fusion, but scripting languages are terrible on server resources, and though I help administer a current system in PHP, my latest rev. is written in Visual Basic 6.0.. The VB DLL stays loaded hot in server memory, and the executable that kicks off is less than 75K, and is lean and mean... An executable will always process faster than a script, because no line by line interpretation is performed by a "Script processing engine"....

We don't use static pages/templates of any kind. Everything is served dynamically through database manipulation... If you have a lot of clients/keywords you are optimizing, this is the only way to fly.....

We brought our lastest system up around 4/15/2000, and with a staff of 4, have optimized over 27,000 keyword phrases in 90 days...

The really nice thing about dynamically serving the crawlers from a database, is employing link strategies. We can test multiple theories simultaneously, and tracking is all automated.

Now for the downside. Not many SEO individuals have the resources or programming knowledge to design and implement such a system, and therefore usually try one of the many PERL scripts that are out there...

These scripts will get your feet wet, and I know Littleman, and a couple of others, have refined them..

So, start simple, but stay organized in your file, pathing structures.