Cloaking interest in the UK and Europe

[Air]

Recently I am noticing more interest in cloaking from webmasters in the UK and mainland Europe than from North America. It would be interesting to hear from those of you that hail from those parts of the world. What is the state of cloaking there, is there the same awareness of it by the seach engines, webmasters? Is a marginally optimized (and possibly cloaked) page enough to rank well?

I know in the UK & Ireland, and European search engines forums, there has been some discussion on the degree of optimization required to rank well, but I don't think the degree of awareness of techniques such as cloaking have ever been discussed.

So what is the state of awareness of cloaking, is even on the radar screen?

[Black Knight]

There's plenty of awareness of cloaking. I know that because many of the webmasters who've discussed its use in global engines are UK based.

Likewise, the main UK engines are local versions of the dot-coms. Google, Ask and MSN being the biggest search sites in the UK as far as I can see right now.

[Damian]

>what is the state of awareness of cloaking, is even on the radar screen?

For the Netherlands, generally cloaking awareness will be lower compared to the US. I'm sure there are many more people involved with cloaking then I know about though, and I think all engines and Dutch seo's will at least know about it.
It is not as public as it is elsewhere, there are no Dutch fora or public discussions on the subject.

Black_Knights point is also true for the Netherlands, to do a good cloaking job reaching a local audience you have to cloak for the major engines, and be able to operate/compete on that level. So a discussion about cloaking for a dutch audience would more likely happen here then somewhere in a local dutch forum.
(if there was one :) )

I once asked Ilse.nl about their view on cloaking and they said that was ok as long as it was not used to spam them. That was some time ago and I wouldn't bet on it today.