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...be a pointless waste of time. Though I haven't read the thread(s) in question, I can tell you that hitting the back button is a good way to 'answer' those types of posts.
Don't worry.
Thanks again
Maybe we should start a new thread though.
We don't mind at all answering any questions you may have regarding cloaking. We just don't want to get into product reviews or recommendations, not because we fear making recommendations, but because historically it has made cloaking forums short lived.
So we decided we simply would not engage. But as I said, all other questions regarding cloaking are fair game. I hope that helps clarify why we took this position.
Littleman knows an awful lot about cloaking, and others here do too, so fire away, and we'll do our best.
I found a couple of suppliers who's web site was full of spelling errors. Wait for the IP updates! No bother paying them.
With competitive keywords I always find redirects and cloaking. And a lot on google and av. Sometimes 80%. And this is for really competitive words. SEO for "normal" words is not difficult. It takes time to learn, but it can be achieved by al lot of people.
But, first question:
A client has a good url. He wants to keep that. Can cloaking be performed from your own server while at the same time visitors go to the original url that is on the customer's server?
I think not, but I never have read it. Answer?
TWO, what's the most important feature of cloacking software.
I think reliability on the accuracy of updates. Answer?
THREE. How hard is it to keep it running? It takes a lot of time to create awesome doorways that sell. Cloaking has advantages (no design suffering thoughts. You can concentrate on the algo's of the SE's and the rankings.
Thanks for the feedback you all !
>A client has a good url. He wants to keep that. Can cloaking be performed from your own server while at the same
>time visitors go to the original url that is on the customer's server?
Yeah, that is easy. Just redirect the human visitors.
>TWO, what's the most important feature of cloacking software.
>I think reliability on the accuracy of updates. Answer?
That it works, and that it is managed wisely.
>THREE. How hard is it to keep it running?
To cloak successfully takes constant vigilance. I am not talking about the technology side, that end could actually pretty simple - I mean constantly watching your logs and making decisions on the fly. Size does help when you are looking for patters.
Somewhat in order of importance (IMO):
-That it predictably delivers pages i.e. it works.
-Yes updates are important.
-Spider detection by IP address (possbly in conjunction with other methods, but if IP delivery is not one of them, ask lot's of questions on how spiders are detected).
-You shouldn't have to "go through cartwheels" every time you want to cloak a new page.
-Link popularity should not be destroyed by a cloaking script for the domain it is cloaking.
-If you are uncomfortable with editing code look for one that is easy to administer with a web interface. If you are comfortable editing code then you can save some money by foregoing the interface.
-Some form of logging so that you know when spiders have cralwed is very useful.
-If you want to target search engines specifically, then look for one that can detect and serve a page based on the specific engine requesting it.
-If you want to target search engines generally, then one that serves the same generically optimized page no matter which engine requests it will do.
Cloaking is best performed on the client's server? Has the setup of a promotional domain on your own server any relation with the cloaking, or is it just to optimize all the url and link text?
Regards!
You can certainly set up cloaking on a promotional domain on your own server. The trade off is that you will not be able to factor in link pop, and if the odd spider slips through it will see your fast redirect.
Using a separate domain to host the optimized pages is much like the doorway domains that were and are still popular, with cloaking you get the ability to hide that code and get away with a fast redirect to the client's domain. So yes, it will work and many people do it this way.
OTOH Cloaking the real domain that hosts the site you are promoting has some benefits if you know what you are doing cloaking wise.
It allows the cloaked pages to be ranked in conjuction with the rest of the site. This way the cloaked pages get the benefit of any links pointing to the real pages, and you also get some benefit from the other pages on the site that relate to the cloaked ones.
It really depends on the business model you have established and are comfortable with when it comes to doing SEO for clients utilizing cloaking. Both approaches will work, I just think that long term the latter method has more longevity, but the former is safer if you don't have a some experience with cloaking.
What does OTOH mean?
Joep Berkers
Sometimes with the webpage I use that lets me see what the
search engines see I can see the page is loaded up with
spam, then they must change it because the spam page
is gone.
"base href" is used as a way to tell the browser how to interpret relative links. Sometimes, when a url that looks like this www.domain.net/dir1/dir2 is used, and dir2 has an index.html page in it, the browser will "think" relative links are relative to dir1 when in fact they should be relative to dir2. By using the <base url="..."> you establish the relative base.
*BUT* I have also seen that tag and similar not too often used tags serve as a "marker" for a script to replace information on a page.
Don't know what the deal is on this one, didn't look too closely.
Mikkel is taking the responsible approach. He know the difference between spam and what we are doing. Mikkel is doing this to counter attack the anti-cloaking talk. Heck, I better ask him to publish it here.
It seems to me that it comes mostly from the SE themselves.. who else would be against it?? We all - here - know that it certainly works.
I do hope that the anti-cloak vibes out there are ONLY a means to derail any would be SEO process from using this technique.
But for interest sake.. what do you Masters of the Web think they (SE) could do to put an end to cloaking??
i think.. not much.
They could hardly stop every site with personalization or that use scripts. E.g. it is pretty common to present different pages in different languages, depending on where you surf from.
Most SEs do not even know what cloaking is. I say Mikkel is the only SE rep that really understand the issue.
Please ask Mikkel to drop by.
This idea of SE not really knowing what cloaking is all about first crossed my mind when i started reading there vague "warnings" about using it.
And then again as i read Air's "playing with fire" post.
But i'd honestly feel completely naive if i say that i truly believe that SE dont know what cloaking is about... but their vague warnings do make me wonder.
Perhaps if they only banned or punished those who had no consistency between the 'real' and 'cloaked' page..
We could all rest easier knowing that!
SE wake up! :)
>Perhaps if they only banned or punished those who had no consistency between the 'real' and 'cloaked' page..
While I do not cloak (only because I don't have the time to devote to doing it properly), I've been interested because anything the SE's put in their crosshairs has implications for SEO in general. Basically, your observation is where Mikkel and others in-the-know re cloaking are narrowing their focus; how to sort out cloaking spam.
Problem with boards like this is that they might read it and pick up an interest. But then again, it is not easy to fight personalization. I doubt they will succeed.
Mikkel is proactive. He is addressing the problem with spam-cloakers as a search engine. He also distinguish between spammers and serious SEO companies that present relevant information.
Mikkel is here somewhere,<shouting> Mikkel! </shouting>
>But for interest sake.. what do you Masters of the Web think they (SE) could do to put an end to cloaking??
It's relatively easy to identify cloaked pages, conceptually at least. The process is:
1. Simply spider a page as usual
2. Revisit that page from an "unknown" domain (unpublished in the present lists of SE owned IPs, distributed at various SEO specialist and cloaking sites) with a typical browser user agent. In other words, appear to be an average surfer.
3. Compare the results of the two visits
I suspect that INK was doing exactly that this spring and summer, perhaps it continues. I saw some statistics as to the percentages of cloaked pages INK detected, published on their web site in the press releases area I think, early this summer but they have subsequently been removed. If memory serves, INK estimated about 15% of their indexed pages used cloaking.
My experience was that INK was burying any pages they found cloaked way down in the listings as a result. It seemed to be mechanical too, stop cloaking and the listing improved within a few weeks. (The cloaking in use was simply presenting optimized pages with relavent content, not spam.)
A cloaker that keeps his IP list up to date and watches his logs carefully can identify this and circumvent it within a short time, but it's an ongoing battle, and VERY high maintenance.
Caution: Shameless rant follows!
<rant>Why should they care about cloaking if the cloaked pages are relavent to the human page being cloaked? Their goal is to provide relavent result to their users. If I was them I'd go after doorways! Here's an exerpt of something I posted elsewhere about doorways.
"If I ran my own little SE and it cost me $2000 per month in server costs and another $5000 per month in phone line costs and I had 1M pages indexed and 750K of them were doorways, I might conclude doorways were spam. OTOH, if I were a struggling webmaster trying to get more then a hundred hits per week, it's absolutely not spam!"
In my simple little example SE, only 250K of the pages indexed are "original" pages with unique content and the remainder are simply doorways, pointing at the uniques. My little SE could have a million unique pages indexed and it wouldn't cost me a dime more except for those durn doorways! This is where the SEs should be looking IMHO and there are indications that they are starting to. </rant>
henki and others mentioned Mikkel de Mib Svendsen and Mikkel's comments are the first sensible, "on the record" comments I've seen about cloaking from any of the SE operators and are a breath of fresh air!
Thanks a lot. I am not sure if I should post my official comment on cloaking here. What do the moderator say?
It was published on I-Search and SEF so far and I have no problem about adding it here to - I just didn't want to do it unless it's OK with the moderator :-)
(It's a little long - <g>)
My goal - as head of a large SE - is to find out the best ways to handle the cloaking issue - together with you guys. We need your help and professional input.
I am sure we can all agree that we as SEs need to protect our indexes against spamming - and that is to me the core issue here - NOT cloaking. Cloaking is just another challenge. It makes it a little harder for us but not impossible.
But instead of just banning all sites using cloaking I'd rather that we work together to find solutions that is acceptable to us all: You, us and the users of the SEs.
