What engines are good to cloak for

[websurfer]

Curious on what engines are no no's and what engines are ok if used properly. I don't want to cloak for spam reasons and am only trying to maintain a quality site, which we all know is hard to design a visually appealing site while achieving great rankings. I have heard that Altavista sends a shadow spider and that Inktomi spiders repeatedly. Are there any others that anyone is aware of that does this. What about a good cloaking program? Any suggestions are greatly apprecited. Thanks folks.

Websurfer

[Air]

The statements about AV and Inktomi are true, it's a matter of giving them the correct page each time they visit. As long as you follow the same rules of relevancy and spamming as a visible page you won't incur their wrath. Infoseek/Go will also appear with non standard User Agent, but once you have seen them they are consistent.

As far as recommending a good product to use, that is something I would like to stay away from. We have made a conscious decision to indulge all queries regarding cloaking in this forum, except for specific product endorsement or review.

BTW I noticed your post count at 2, so I'll extend a welcome to WMW forums - welcome.

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't find it amusing that the only two engines I wish to cloak for are the only two where there maybe some risk involved. Alta and Ink have both had cloaking red flags thrown up a time or two by webmasters.

Last winter, there were many of us who felt Alta was strategically going after cloakers. I don't think that is still the case. I've had many high ranking pages that I have cloaked 'after the fact', that have remained there. A couple of scares recently when almost all the pages in our care that are cloaked, dropped and then came back up (whew), but so far it is still working ok.

Inktomi is another situation. I kinda think they are looking for cloakers and more importantly, finding them. You really have to stay up on the ip's with ink - domain name/agent checking isn't enough.

The other engines, I don't really consider cloak worthy. You can for Excite and Fast, but you aren't going to gain much in the way of traffic because of their nature. Excite is so sporatic at listing submissions, that it is hit and miss. I do with Excite the same with others in that I cloak/obfuscate after the fact (wait for a high ranking page, and then cloak it to protect the code). Normally, I go the route of obfuscation to just screw the meta description/keywords/title up - which is normally enough to f'over someone page jacking. I try to be subtle about it and just rearrange stuff (print the title words in reverse order...along that lines).

As for software, hit your favorite search engine and go at it. If a cloaking program is worth its salt, you'll find it in the engines ;)

[DaveAtIFG]

My own admittedly limited experiences mirror Brett's for the most part.

However, I've cloaked effectively for AV since early '99 with no discernable penalties. They are likely aware of it but the pages presented to the spider contain the same content presented to a normal visitor, they are just simplified, no tables, limited images, revised metas, etc. There is another thread here somewhere about a recent SEO conference, and AV's reported comments seem to confirm that if the cloaked page is relavent, they ignore it.

My experience with INK has been they will bury your listing if they detect cloaking but at least they don't ban you.