Search Engine Cloaking?

does it still work?

[nkakar]

hey guys, ive been researching lately on search engine cloaking which includes both ip cloaking and user agent cloaking.. ive heard that they still work, but how can they work when search engines such as google and now yahoo have pages that are cached, which show you exactly what they visited. yet one of the most accredited people i know in search engine marketing says that he still uses ip cloaking to find out which search engine is hitting his pages and than forwards those specific spiders to specific templates of his website... any ideas?

[Str0ud]

Nkakar,
most folks use a script that tells the search engine not to cache the site.

[volatilegx]

They use this meta tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

[Str0ud]

There is speculation that google penalizes the noarchive tag so some folks are using a java script instead.

[Brett_Tabke]

we can garantee you that g does not even consider the noarchive tag for rankings purposes. Noarchive is about liability protection and privacy concerns.

[willamowius]

Brett, are you really sure it's not even a small factor?

It's obvious that they can't bind a big penalty on it, but I too have the feeling there is a small penalty associated with it.

[Blue Gravity]

we can garantee you that g does not even consider the noarchive tag for rankings purposes. Noarchive is about liability protection and privacy concerns.

I know G doesn't ban you for having it, but I do think that some type of red flag goes up to be reviewed for cloaking tactics.

[seomike2003]

Doubt it

[ThomasB]

From what I remember having "noarchive" is a red flag but won't have any effect unless other bad things/lots of spam reports are discovered.

[seomike2003]

It's a red flag for SEO eyes meaning come in and look at my source code etc etc. But I've seen plenty of mom and pop sites that use it and every other version of a meta tag likewise. They read the tutorials on creating meta tags and think they have to put 15 metas in their head :)

[Marcia]

It's still working. I just came across another one a couple hours ago at Google - with the cloaked page sitting right there in the cache. And another at Yahoo just the other day, had to look a little further for that one.