Cloaking pros and cons

[grnidone]

Since Air_ is concerned about keeping Cloaking -Stealth topic alive, I would like to ask all of you to list what you believe the pros and cons are of cloaking.

*G gets into her lazy boy and flips up the foot rest*

-G

[Air]

grnidone

Good questions, this should make for an interesting discussion.... of course I may come and get you out of that lazy boy to hear what you think the pros and cons are ....

[grnidone]

Honestly, that is why I asked the question. I am new to cloaking, and I would like to know what the pros and cons are.

Thanks everyone.
-G

[Q]

O.K.--I'll break this ice on this one:

Pros
1. Code Protection
2. Ability to feed specific pages to specific engines
3. Ability to modify pages that "visitors" see without
changing well ranked pages
4. Ability to experiment with meta's, code, keywords, kw density and still serve a regular, attractive page to visitors.

Cons
1. It is percieved as something dirty or underhanded.
2. It is easy to abuse, so people will abuse it, by spamming, codejacking, etc. (which leads us back to con #1)
3. There is always the possibility that SE's will aggressively try to detect it and start banning for it.

For the record, I do use cloaking. I would say I use it pretty conservatively. Most of my cloaked pages are nearly identical to the visitor page I just tweak them a little bit for each engine. I have had moderate success with it as far as SEO goes. My main reason for employing it was code protection.

O.K.--now you have a scape goat--Fire away!

[lizzie]

I saw around 200 cloaked pages in GOTO.com (is that Infoseek?)
from the same company promoting the same thing with different
keywords. It works beautifully for them on this se at least.

The titles and descriptions were all different but I always went to the same page. I would love to do this. Can anyone recommend a cloaking software program that works great for
a newbie and has good updates?

I sure would love to see what their pages look like that the se sees. Do you think they made all 200 pages manually? I tried a demo version of a doorway pagemaker and made 100 pages with it and submiitted them (let the spiders crawl them from a page of links to them) and never got one hit or anything. I guess the se's didn't like them. Even if I get some good software for this and figure out how to use it I'm stll going to be making doorway pages the old fashioned way.

Please anyone who wants to recommend some software let me know.

[makemetop]

As GoTo is pay per click organisation and your keyphrase bid price gets you ranking they are the least likely SE to ever ban cloaking or anything else as it is irrelevent to them as long as they are getting money for each click. Think you are confusing them with GO (which is Infoseek). So, on GoTo different key phrases, provided the same company has a high bid on all of them, will always bring up the same web site. Nothing to do with cloaking - (unless it is for Inktomi results - but that's a different story)!