Cloaking Vs other methods

Pls help a newbie

[gopi]

I am new to the topic of cloaking. I understand that in cloaking , failure is not an option.So as a newbie i feel it very risky to cloak pages as i cannot afford if the engines find and ban me.

So thinking about other methods to deliver users to a Good looking page and also delivering engines optimized spider food , IFrame technique and JS redirect come to my mind ,but the problem with that is it easily detectable by humans (if not by engines) and the risk of a competitor reporting it always exist.

So what if popup'ing a full size window with the fancy page from the optimized page.Will anyone knows the effectivenes of this method.
I believe engines will not find it illegal as its just a popup.

Please Comment...

[startup]

I know exactly how you feel and the best answer I know of came from "Air". When you start cloaking serve the exact same page until you get used to the script.
Get used to updating IPs and tracking the spiders as they go through your site.
Once you have a good understanding of what is involved start changing the pages you want to and witch parameters you want to use.
Have fun with it.

[volatilegx]

gopi, another safety measure is to cloak from a domain different from your main site. This will insulate your main site from any SEO campaigns that might go overboard and/or being detected as a cloaker.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

Cloaking on another domain is not a 100% guarantee that you will never get penalized on your primary domain. However, I do agree that the risk is lower - but it's just not completely gone :)

> i cannot afford if the engines find and ban me.

If that is your first priority I think you should stay away from cloaking and any other border-line techniques for that sake. Go for "search engine freindly design" strategies, linkbuilding and all the other old-fashioned hard-work. It still works :)

[Air]

Hello Mikkel, good to see you stop by. That's good advice ...