Forum Moderators: open
None of the engines that provide guidelines spell out clearly IMO that it is unacceptable.
Altavista uses the wording:
Some other people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what users will see.
From one point of view that would mean no cloaking. But use the word content to mean what the site is about, and it is entirely different - now cloaking would seem ok if the spider sees what the site is about and the user gets information relevant to what the spider saw.
Google has this to say:
Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.
Now had they stopped at the word "cloaking" it would be clear. Adding "to distort their search rankings." makes it an ambiguous statement, and would lead you to believe that if you are not distorting your search rankings (irrelevant content, and other forms of spam) then it is acceptable.
I also asked them what they suggest for protecting your code since it damages their index when copied pages are submitted until both get removed, and is a no win for the webmaster(s) involved or the engine.
Doubt I'll get any replies, but am I playing with fire? In this case it may be cold fusion ...
Doesn't microsoft.com UA deliver? I doubt google would ban them.
Hey, that's my line - go get your own! :)
I've had an ongoing love/hate relationship with cloaking since I first tried it in 96. At that time I wasn't really into it for SEO sake, but for optimizing between Lynx and Netscape. I didn't care for it because of the management overhead.
Then in mid to late 97, I started to nail the algo at infoseek (along with dozens of other seo people). Optimize a site in the morning, and have it listed by sundown. Those were the days eh?
The only trouble was I started to notice that after I hit the algo on about a thousand keywords, suddenly, my pages started to show up on dozens of sites. hmmm. suppose the two were related? I nailed the algo in August of 97 on Infoseek using a program running on a computer1
I'd heard people talking about a thing everyone was called Stealth (nobody had heard of cloaking back then). So, I started just hiding my meta tags from people while delivering them to search engines. I remember one moment in particular while blindly stumbling through Infoseek results - now this is cool stuff (love it).
So, I went insane with cloaked pages from 97 to mid 98. When I do something - I do it. I went from doing 4-5 thousand pages of my own to nearly 100k pages for clients in 98. Wow. major league cloaking overload. My God, that was just 28 months ago - it seems like a lifetime.
Then I happened to get a visit from a stock user agent from the new Excite@Home partnership. Two days later our 15k referrals a day from AOL/Netscape went to zero on dozens of domains that were registered in the same name. I lost two top notch cash cow clients over it. That week I removed all cloaking. (hate it)
Since then, it has been an up and down love/hate relationship all the way. I've tried going cold turkey twice and been completely unsuccessful. I keep crawling on back. The current thinking now is to wait for a page to start to pull from some top keyword and then go cloak it after-the-fact.
--
1 Ok...it was a commodore 128. But, it did have the 20mhz accel adapter. The real historical footnote is that the ml program was converted to perl and it now runs about twice as slow on my 500celeron. I will deny any knowledge of this post.
it seems the key to succesfull cloaking is to have email notifications when something out of ordinary is happening and then rapid responce to cut the losses/fix problems
but its such a drag...
Brett, I used to be Amiga guy :), that litlle box ruled and would be my choice still if commodore did not fold..
ahh well
>>> seems the key to succesfull cloaking is to have email notifications when something out of ordinary is happening and then rapid responce to cut the losses/fix problems.
i have that and trust me it is hard too keep it up.. you can save a few hits but not a lot as by the time you get the email they are onto you :o(
This tag comes right before the end head tag.
What sort of technology is this page using?
I go to a website where I can "see what the search engines see"
and look at this and sometimes see a page with a lot of spam, then after I look at it that way a few times I don't see any spam as if they have switched it to a spamless page.
You have a response to this question at the other post [webmasterworld.com]
Dave
I would just like to say that cloacking is not playing with fire, but a MUST for any serious webmaster. You work your butt off to make your site place well then any shmuck just copy paste all your work and get right with you or better. It happen to me. They were even so stupid they left my name in meta tags. :)
Cloaking will prevent this, period!
Fine inexpensive prog like the one you find in AV search for "cloak" will do just that and more.
Actually it's always interesting why, how and who comes top in the SE. After all they must use their own program to achive that. :)
Have a look!
my 2c
Cheers to all
Edited by: vista
Seriously, this is one the best forums I know bout.
What a luck to stumble on this one.
Well, let's keep going.
Edited by: Air
As for Gogle, I am there. All the top positions and no cloaking yet.
[ooops! you'll notice I snipped the reference to my site as we discussed via e-mail - I appreciate the thought, but a no-no here at WebmasterWorld]
There is a Meta Tag to keep you site from being cached. :)
And it works.
TIA
Ok, I went read the whole thing and it boild to this:
1) Gogle only
2) My site is cached already
Q:
Does the prog I am using detects Gogle?
a) if it does then I will use the tag
b) if it doesn't then feed Gogle with nice door page.
I guess I am going about the whole thing backwards.
I already have the cloak program and now I am trying to learn about cloaking. Shortly after I bought it I really got busy with many sites and did only VERY short testing. Now I am finally getting ready to use it to is full potential.
Can't wait to see what really it can do. :)
