claus - 4:07 pm on Dec 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

Interesting thread, thanks for starting it volatilegx, i was speculating a bit but i haven't really had the chance to check anything. Also that /. thingy, a few good points, and nice to get an outside view although... the off topic topics these people drift to...

I think it might be too soon to consider cloaking, as who knows exactly what you should be cloaking for at this stage? Yes gbot, i know, but what should the content of those cloaked pages be, really? It's all good with random content, markov chains and such, but it reminds me very much of the talk of "de-optimizing" pages, i'm not sure any of this is really good unless you know the exact effects of what you're doing, and really... who does at this moment?

Also, this change is ...special (for lack of better words) so a few (even very obvious) "tech-solutions" might have slipped under the radar in some areas whereas similar ones have been caught in other areas. And, the changes are not over yet, perhaps they'll even be continouus for some time, who knows outside the "plex"?

Anyway, some controlled experiments might yield insights and i'm always for insights, but i have my doubts about efficiency outside luck and coincidence at this moment (although, of course, i might be wrong). Personally, i'm more on the "optimize your sites" path, (aka. whitehat or whatever), although i know a lot of you are very sceptic here, and i can't really explain why i see good results for some pages/keywords and not others - at least not as in "general rules" or "one-size-fits-all".

One thought though: to do cloaking successfully you have to control your technology and exactly what you display to whom and on which url's - i've seen dropped whitehat examples that just don't do this very well... aka. the duplicate issue agian

/claus