Google, Cloaking, and <meta..."noarchive">

What are you experinces with cloaking in Google.

[djuice999]

I receive great traffic from Google and google.yahoo.com, but I decided to cloak any ways because of too many sites coming up under my keyword terms that are not directly related to the search terms. I have only targeted keyword terms that are directly related to my site. But I have used the "meta='googlebot' name='noarchive'" meta tag to prevent Google from caching my page. I have read the page on Google.com that says: "We may permenently ban sites that ingage in cloaking to distort our search results", but the word "may" is the keyword here

Has anyone been banned from Google for cloaking with optimised pages with keywords relating directly to their site?

or

Has anyone's cloaking been discovered by the Google staff by using the noarchive tag?

[grnidone]

Welcome to the forums, Juice!

I don't have an answer for you but I will rally the troops to try to get one. I think the Google expert has been swamped for the last few weeks, so hang in there!

-G

[Marshall Clark]

I know there's already been some heated discussion on the matter, but what's the current consensus on the effect of using the noarchive tag on your Google rankings?

[Air]

I have had it on and taken it off, and really I haven't noticed any ill effect either way. There was another thread that talked about this HERE [webmasterworld.com]

This is one of those subjects though, where multiple opinions exist and probably different experiences might exist too.

[Machiavelli]

I am beginning to think that it is not the noarchive tag in itself that will ban you/rank you down. What is more likely is what I think djuice999 was saying here "Has anyone's cloaking been discovered by the Google staff by using the noarchive tag?". Googlebot could easily be set up to flag every page for the attention of the staff if it had the no-archive tag.

Since very few people use the tag, and almost all who do have tried to optimise for SEs to an extent, then it is probably very easy for the Google staff to check this site's pages for 'bad' cloaking (particularly if used in conjunction with another flag, eg more that 1000 pages from one domain in the index) and ban accordingly.

[PeteU]

Yes and yes

[djuice999]

Google just missed my pages, after I put noarchive tag in them, for it's most recent update. I am optimistic that they won't ban me for cloaking because I have not targeted any words that are unrelated. I think that even if they look at my cloaking job, they won't take me out. You would think that they would check your link pop in their database to see how respected you site is according to their PageRank system. My site has over 280 inbound links on google including my Yahoo, Dmoz, 100.com listings and more. I What to you all think.

[rtfmnews]

I added the noarchive meta tag on my primary site, and it was dropped from Google after their next update following the Googlebot's visit. I don't do any cloaking on this site whatsoever.

The site has adequate link pop (>200 links), including a listing in ODP. It's either a coincidence, or the site was dropped because of the noarchive meta tag. Anyway, I eliminated the tag, and resubmitted the site to Google. I guess we'll know in a couple months, if it got back into the database.

Kinda disappointing, since the site was in Google's top ten for the search phrase "website promotion" and Google/Yahoo was a nice source of traffic. Searching on that term now, it's clear that Google is easily spammed, a lot more so than it appeared a couple months ago. Is anyone aware of a recent change in their algo?

:)
Dan0

[Marshall Clark]

I'm curious if anyone has tried using either a javascript or js redirect on their Google page to prevent viewing of the cached file. Have you seen any evidence that Google is downranking pages that use this technique?

[Air]

Hey Marshall,

I recall in another thread a few months ago you were experimenting with redirects for the cached pages, did you ever try it, any results you want to share?

[eljefe3]

>>I added the noarchive meta tag on my primary site, and it was dropped from Google after their next update following the Googlebot's visit.

>>It's either a coincidence, or the site was dropped because of the noarchive meta tag.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all. Way back when yahoo switched over to google I noticed a lot of my competitors used the no archive tag as they were spamming the heck out of the engine and didn't want people to see their huge fonts, repeated keywords etc. Now for the last couple of months they have dropped using this tactic and have reverted to text matching the background image. I would say almost for sure they changed their tactic because of the noarchive tag.

>>Anyway, I eliminated the tag, and resubmitted the site to Google.

rtfmnews if you made this change before the 22-24th of December you should see your site back when google updates in January (around the 18th-20th or so)as googlebot was out crawling during this time.

[rtfmnews]

Thanks eljefe3, I did get crawled a couple days ago, and the tag had been removed as soon as we dropped out of Google.

I don't think the noarchive tag is the problem, though. A lot of sites were dropped at the last update, that didn't use the noarchive tag.

Dan0
:)

[eljefe3]

Dan0,

A few months back there were reports of domains being dropped. The good news was that they showed up in the next update.

[Macguru]

To Marshall and Air

Hi there! I am new here and my mother tongue is French. I will try to make sense ok?

I need redirect because I use frames.

If you search «artistes verriers» on Google, the 2nd top position redirect, and the first is the index.htm it is redirected to.

Hope it can help

Happy new year to all!

[Mike_Mackin]

YO MacGuru & Welcome

My Twin 450 G4 with 256 RAM is working fine under Sys 9.
Now if I could get NS6 to work I'd make some $

[Macguru]

Hello Mike_Mackin,

My single 400/dual 21" mon./256 Meg/UW SCSI-160 raid 0/G4 is doing fine on sys 9 and OSX beta, too.

But ironically, my vintage 8/8" mon./128k/zilch HD/Mac can boot from a 400 k floppy, print a single page of text and then shut down in 15 seconds flat!

As for NS6, the french version failed to install on my Aptiva on Win98 and is not already available in French for my preferred platfom.

C'est la vie!