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All I will say is look around you and open your eyes. Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, Global crossing, and Adelphia, as well as many others, thought they could get away with unethical activities. They were wrong.
I still fail to see the analogy
I can believe there are ethical reasons for cloaking. Presenting different pages to different browsers, for example, would be ethical.
However, in my experience, many times cloaking is an attempt to "fool" a search engine into believing a site is something that it is not. That is unethical.
How does it relate to Arthur Anderson et al?
Ethics starts small. All of us make ethical decisions all of the time, every day. Do we speed to work? Do we run that traffic light? Do we sell that product even though we know it's questionable? And so on.
And, of course, do we (the collective we) doctor the books? Do we overlook that auditing flaw? And when we hear in the halls that someone is doctoring the books, do we take action?
What does Arthur Anderson have to do with unethical cloaking? Different degrees of out-ethics. One "overlooked" accounting problems, another attempts to "fool" search engines. Which is more unethical? Does it matter - they both are.
And ethics problems start small and get larger. People who have ethics issues tend to allow other people to have ethics issues - at least that's my experience. And people who don't - don't tend to allow them.
Take an example. A man who has stolen money from a company finds out that someone else is doctoring the books. Does he tell? Nope, not a prayer. On the other hand, someone who is "clean" will almost certainly make it known to someone.
At least that my experience and my humble opinion.
Richard Lowe
Is hidden text the same ethically as cloaking in your eyes?
What about link exchanges for SEO purposes. Is that the same?
How about composing your content to say your keywords alot, even though that devalues the user experience, as it must?
A man who has stolen money from a company finds out that someone else is doctoring the books. Does he tell?
Probably. People are usually pretty good at rationalizing their own activities while judging others.
The man who has stolen money proably doesn't see himself as unethical, he sees himself as somehow being justified in what he does. Seeing someone else doctoring the books will either move him to report that person -- either in righteous anger, or in order to help his own image -- or to steal more money.
Ethics starts small. All of us make ethical decisions all of the time, every day. Do we speed to work?
These "slippery slope" arguments are usually gross oversimplifications. Do you think that people who speed on the way to work are so close to taking that step where they'll, say, embezzle 50 grand once they get there? Are they two steps away from being ax murderers?
I would actually agree with you that cloaking can and often is ethical. I'm even considering it myself to present different versions of the home page to different browers. You know, an HTML 4.01 version, a 3.2 version and so on. ASP driven.
If cloaking is used in such a way to simply present the honest information about a site in the optimum manner to a specific audience (robot or human) then I suppose I would have no objection.
Hidden text? I would consider that unethical.
A smattering of keywords? Just smart.
Good ALT tags? Again, just smart.
My view is a web site's only purpose is to communicate something. Period. The communication might be "buy this, it's great" or it might be much more complex.
Of course, there is the human audience and the robot audience. You have to communicate with both.
The unethical part is adding things which communicate lies or blur the truth. That's what I've been attempting to say (perhaps not very well).
Hope that clarifies things a bit!
Richard Lowe
The unethical part is adding things which communicate lies or blur the truth.
I wouldn't disagree with that. But that doesn't boil down to meaning that cloaking is unethical -- or that once you cloak you're on the way to another Enron!
Hidden text? I would consider that unethical.
In all cases? Or only when it communicates lies or blurs the truth?
Cloaking is a technique. It is a powerful technnique. It can be used for unethical purposes. So can any seo technique.
I am betting that Google gets this too. I am hoping that, if they review one of my cloaked sites, they will see that I am fairly and directly concentrating and summarizing the content of that site. And for most of my sites, especially the larger ones, this is the only way to effectively promote their database driven content. These are good, relevant sites that the searcher will get good value from seeing.
You want to discuss ethics. That is a big discussion and not for the faint of heart. And it is not about vague idealistic ravings and emotional appeals to family values, patriotism and god. All those things have been used to justify the worst sort of ethics - war, genocide and imperialism.
Ethics is about logically breaking down your thoughts and arguments and having them stand to rational discourse and evaluation.
So, please stop with the shallow and insulting analogies with the big and obvious pigs and tycoons. That is easy stuff and, I think, and unethical form of argument. :-)
I think, first off, we have to settle this issue of form and content. If I use all of your approved techniques (I don't know what they are yet...) to promote war mongering money grubbing thieves and scoundrels, then is that more ethical than if I cloak like a madman to promote feeding quadrapelegic schitzophrenic homeless? Of course not. You are making a fundamental ethical error - you are confusing form and content.
Will you back off that so we can have a real discussion about the ethics of marketing, advertising and site promotion?
Do you think that people who speed on the way to work are so close to taking that step where they'll, say, embezzle 50 grand once they get there?
Of course not. But I do know from experience that small ethics issues lead to bigger ones and then to bigger ones still. Speeding may not have been the right analogy, though.
I seriously doubt that Adelphia "lost" billions of dollars without many, many people being aware. Yet no one seemed to have the courage to tell anyone. Why? Fear? Who knows what the justifications were! The point is simple - people knew and they didn't report it. Thus, what should have been stopped fast went on to more or less destroy a huge company (I heard on the news that Adelpia "lost" 60 billion dolllars! Heck, I panic if a $20 is missing from my wallet! How could someone lose 60 billion?
Ethics starts with us. The level of ethics in any group will be equal to the level of unethics that the group will tolerate.
Interesting discussion, by the way.
Richard Lowe
What do you say about the form vs content issue?
You want to discuss ethics. That is a big discussion and not for the faint of heart. And it is not about vague idealistic ravings and emotional appeals to family values, patriotism and god. All those things have been used to justify the worst sort of ethics - war, genocide and imperialism.
Of course not. Ethics has nothing to do with virtually all of those things. Absolutely nothing.
Ethics is simple: I will treat you fairly and honestly, and you will treat me fairly and honestly. We will also insist that others in our group treat each other fairly and honestly.
That's what ethics is to me. Thus I do not steal - that would not be treating others fairy and honestly. I do not lie - same reason. I also do not put up with others lying to me or stealing from me. And yes, I would report someone who was stealing from my company, regardless of his rank or power. That robs from everyone.
How does this fit into into marketing and promotion?
The philosophy fits perfectly. I will promote my site using fair and honest means, and I expect you to do the same, and we can both expect others to do the same. We have the right to stop people who are not honestly and fairly promoting their sites and products.
The search engines are attempting to produce good results for searchers. If what you are doing aids in that goal, then it is communicating well and is honest. For example, if your site is about sewing and sells sewing machines, then working within the rules defined by the search engines (and other promotional techniques) to get your site viewed by people interested in that topic is perfectly ethical.
Ethics is about logically breaking down your thoughts and arguments and having them stand to rational discourse and evaluation.
I disagree. Ethics is a way that we human beings can live together and peace and harmony. Without ethics, we tend not to get along and cause lots of harm to each other.
So, please stop with the shallow and insulting analogies with the big and obvious pigs and tycoons. That is easy stuff and, I think, and unethical form of argument. :-)
Sometimes a sledgehammer is the appropriate tool to get people's attention ...
I think, first off, we have to settle this issue of form and content.
Okay, I'll bite.
Form - how something is presented.
Content - What is presented.
Are you using those definitions (simple as they are)?
Richard Lowe
Or only when it communicates lies or blurs the truth?
Ahem. Of course you are right.
RichLowe: Hidden text? I would consider that unethical.
JayC: In all cases? Or only when it communicates lies or blurs the truth?
RichLowe: Ahem. Of course you are right.
OK... let's go another step then: Google says "don't use hidden text." They do not say "it's OK to use hidden text as long as it doesn't communicate lies or blur the truth."
So is it ethical to use hidden text that "good" way? Or is it the same rationalization as the guy who steals postage stamps from the office because, damn it, I've worked here 20 years they can pay for my stamps? If a search engine says "don't do this on pages you submit to us," is it ethical to say "well the way I do it is OK?"
If not for cloaking, why for hidden text?
Good ALT tags? Again, just smart.
Let's imagine a search engine representative says, "anything you do specifically for the purpose of increasing your rankings is spam." So is it is ethical to use your keywords in your ALT tags? Is it ethical to purposely calculate your keyword density and yet fail to exclude the spider of a search engine that says "doing our job would be easier without SEO?"
Who has the ethical right to decide what's best for the "user experience" of Google's visitors? Webmasters, site operators, and optimization consultants? Or Google themselves?
Slippery slope, indeed.
[Edit: fixed a typo]
[edited by: JayC at 5:18 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2002]
Got to go to bed now, though.
Richard Lowe
Richard Lowe
Cloaking, from my experience, is just the safest and most direct way to present concentrated and summarized content to the se spiders while maintaining a quality human user experience.[webmasterworld.com...]
I got a good laugh out of this one. First off, it is not the safest way to present content. The safest way would be to provide the same content to the search engine spider AND the human user.
As far as "quality human user experience" goes, I have never heard cloaking defended quite this way before. The vast majority of cloaked sites I have run across consisted of irrelevant spam and I hit the back button immediately. Let's assume your site is different. If your content is good enough for a human visitor, why wouldn't it be for the spider?
You can minimize this by cloaking "well" - by making it impossible to detect by your competitors. That implies IP/User agent cloaking rather than simple user agent cloaking and other “best practices”.
It's impossible to hide cloaking. If the field is that competitive your competitors will no doubt be looking for it and it's not that difficult to expose or decloak a cloaked site.
You are confusing ethics with personal values. You are wrong to oversimplify ethical issues. Ethics must stand up to reason. Otherwise, it is not ethics, but prejeduce, faith and religion. If ethics does not stand up to reason, it falls prey to manipulation as the demagogues of the world know.
You equate Cloaking with bad ethics. I don't. I am trying to disect the issue to understand why we disagree.
Vague references to "peace and harmony" can be twisted and distorted in all kinds of ways. The power of ethics is the reasoned and logical dissection of the issue. I speak with some authority on this, I believe. I minored in philosophy and ethics at Berkeley and took graduate courses on the topic. You won't find anybody in the academic community agree with your statements in this regard. However, my intent is not to appeal to authority, but to rationally break it down through dialogue.
To start off, you equate cloaking and bad ethics. I am challenging you on that. I say that the issue is not the tool you use, but what you do with the tool. Bad ethics for economic gain is rampant throughout the world and especially in the US. That stuff takes all kinds of forms.
You will not pursuade me by just saying that cloaking is bad. You must justify your position. I think that means we must clear away the vagueness and prejudice. Which, to me, means we have to get past the form and content issue.
In this content:
Cloaking is the form. It is a tool.
Content is what you do with it.
I stated the issue pretty plainly, I think.
The tool can be used for what I would consider ethically sound purposes and for blatently unethical purposes.
Cloaking is a tool. Admittedly, it is a much more powerful tool than others. Take keyword stuffing into the visible content as an example. This is a much less powerful tool for SEO. Sure, cloaking can be used to totally misrepresent the page (It seems stupid, to me to do this because it is so ineffective, but email spammers, irritatingly enough, do that all the time).
So, I am trying to get you to say clearly what the issue is. I think it has to be one of these:
1. The tool is evil. Some tools should not be used. For good or bad reasons. It is all unethical. If that is your position, I would like to hear you say which SEO tools are ethical and which are not and why. I really can't guess how you are thinking, please state it clearly.
or
2. You agree with me that it is what you do with the tool. If you keyword stuff to promote exploitive products, or distort the contents to mislead the visitor or do pushy and annoying things, then that is unethical. If you use the tool to accurately represent quality products so that visitors find them, then that is ethical. In this case, we can get off the "cloaking is bad" chant and move on to real and substantial issues about the ugly ethics that is so prevelant throughout the entire marketing and advertising industries and in society at large.
I see SEO approaches as nothing more than a mirror of search engine function. The SE algorithm is a secret, the successfully optimized page is an accurate reflection of that algorithm, therefore it must be kept secret too, so SEOs started cloaking to protect their investment in deciphering the algo.
Why does the SE algo have to be a secret? Would everyone rank 1st. otherwise? I suggest it is because the search engines want to protect their intellectual property from their competitor(s), i.e. other search engines, just as webmasters/SEOs do.
The search engines rewarded sites which were poorly designed for human consumption with higher rankings, while sites that use databases, javascript, lot's of images, and a myriad of other technological advancements that spiders could not keep up with were badly hurt. The SEO response? Serve a version of the page spiders will find palatable while serving people a version of that same page that is not so design constrained.
Those that did not/could not/would not cloak used the doorway page as their answer to that bit of search engine imperfection. As search engines became flooded with doorway pages the search engines grew more disenchanted with doorways and began to take action.
For a while search engines publically embraced cloaking, it seemed that it was a way to compensate for spider inadequacy while at the same time allowing directory quality pages to be shown to human visitors instead of those dreaded doorway pages created by the millions by those ethical souls (sorry couldn't resist :))
As search engines tightened the reigns on doorways of all types and began dropping them like hot coals from their indexes, a new breed of doorway entered the scene.
This doorway looked just like other pages of the site, with links pointing to it and from it to other pages of the site. Many pages were built like this, following the same navigation and design as the rest of the site to make it harder for a search engine to detect them as pages targetting a specific keyword set, in other words a doorway. Some people built thousands of these, some even began confusing these with content, and the refrain that "content is king" started. People found that they could get many desireable keyword phrases well ranked using this approach.
The engines not liking any suggestion that their algo was exploitable, and since the line between optimizing and content was blurred, caused individual pages began to lose relevance. The era of the theme was born. Guess what happened then? Everyone was themeing their sites to improve rankings. (As a side note, our very own Brett coined the term "themes", quite a concept. Worked like a charm)
But now themes were determining what a site was about, and the webmaster/SEO could create a theme if he/she understood the concepts, and it allowed them to rank well for their chosen theme. We can now repeat the refrain from above, the engines not liking any suggestion that their algo was exploitable, and since the line between optimizing and content was blurred began to implement external linking as a means of establishing and validating theme and authority of a site.
The response is predictable, lot's of people interlinked sites, joined link farms, signed guestbooks, created their own web hubs, and begged and borrowed and traded links to improve ranking. Ok, time for the SE chorus again, the engines not liking any suggestion that their algo was exploitable, and since the line between optimizing and content was blurred .....
We won't even talk about grovelling for links from sites with higher PR to improve our status all things being equal (guffaw !)
So you see, It is not about ethics IMO, it's about intent, it's about a cloak existing in the absence of a cloak. It's cloaking so refined that it looks like content, so refined that it looks like higher PR, so refined that it looks like many incoming links. It is cloaking so refined that it can be called content, It is cloaking so refined as to delude intention.
The ranking efforts cannot be seen by visitors to a site, they won't know how it got a higher PR and status, they won't know that the links were solicited, they won't know how many thought enough of the site to link to it without being asked. They won't know that the two hundred page site really only needs to be fifteen pages, or that the structure, content, and languange of the pages is not what it might be in a world without search engines. Luckily they'll never know, and increasingly neither will the search engines. Soon everyone will be happy.
You are confusing ethics with personal values.
Nope, you are confused about the subject. Ethics is "A set of principles of right conduct." Also, "motivation based on ideas of right and wrong". It's very simple and it's very personal.
You are wrong to oversimplify ethical issues.
Nope. You are overcomplicating a simple subject.
You equate Cloaking with bad ethics.
Defining cloaking as presenting your web site differently to search engines and human beings in order to gain higher search engine rankings than you otherwise would. This is unethical as it violates the terms and conditions of the search engine. DOn't like those terms and conditions? Don't promote your site using the search engine.
why we disagree
We disagree because you are equating ethics to a philosphical study, something you rationalize about and debate in school.
Ethics is not that at all. Ethics (not to be confused with morals) has nothing to do with philosphy, school, debates, "rational discussions" or anything like that. Ethics is a way to live, a way to be treated and to treat others.
Vague references to "peace and harmony"
Nothing vague about it if you understand what the words mean.
The power of ethics is the reasoned and logical dissection of the issue.
Nope. Ethics has nothing to do with that at all. Period. Ethics is not philosophy. It's a way of living, presenting yourself to the world and reacting to the world.
I speak with some authority on this, I believe. I minored in philosophy and ethics at Berkeley and took graduate courses on the topic.
So? What's your point? Ethics is not something that is taught - it is something lived. Philosophy has nothing to do with ethics so is not relevent.
To start off, you equate cloaking and bad ethics.
Yep. You do understand! Cloaking is bad ethics because you are using a tool (Google) and are violating the terms and conditions of that tool when you use it. That's why it is unethical.
The tool is evil.
Nuclear weapons are evil. Biological weapons are evil. Chemical weapons are evil. These are examples of evil weapons. Assault rifles are evil. The only purpose of these weapons is to kill or to intimidate and their only use is to destroy.
Those things qualify as evil. Cloaking is not in the same league.
If cloaking is used, all search engines that forbid them in their terms and conditions should be excluded in the robots.txt file. By allowing your site to be listed in a search engine, you are implicitly agreeing to their terms and conditions. Violating those terms and conditions willingly and knowingly, no matter how noble the purpose, is unethical.
Do you get it now?
Richard Lowe
I am not aware that it is that easy to decloak a site using ip/ua delivery. I would appreciate anything you have to say about how to do that. But, my point is not to contest that. Is there really a way to "fake" an ip address. That is, can you send an ip request and to a site and have the server think the request is comming from a different ip address than it really is?
Really though, I think we agree on the key point. You cannot hide the fact that you cloak from the search engine if they want to know.
On your point about safety. I have to disagree. I sure hear a lot of stories about PR0, banned sites and fear on this board. Those issues appear to be associated with traditional (non-cloak) seo activities that the spider can see, evaluate and penalize. We havn't had those problems. The problem, of course comes from the necessity of non-cloaked sites trying to fulfill two goals (top rankings and quality content for the visitors) with one presentation. Then, they stretch the SEO stuff and get a penalty. It seems, to me, to be pretty clear that cloaking is a much safer technique so long as you stay under the radar.
My issues revolve around the situation where you cannot stay under the radar.
On your other point about quality user experience, I really don't understand what you are saying. It is clear that by presenting one page directed at the spider with the purpose of ranking well frees you to present a beautiful and human direct page to the human visitor. You don't have to compromise the human experiencen for SEO purposes. I don't understant what you are saying about seeing irrelevant spam" and having to hit the back button immediately. That doesn't sound like a cloaked site. If the site is cloaked, you should see no spam (irrelevant or otherwise), because the site is cloaked - that stuff is for the search engine spider, not you using a browser. A cloaked site should be showing you a nice page empty of spam because the spam is not necessary. Can you pleas clarify your point here? It makes no sense to me.
Richard Lowe
Thanks for all of the opinions! I have some food for thought.
Richard Lowe
Jack_Straw,
You don't need to fake the IP. I believe Brett has asked previously that members not discuss decloaking methods. In any case it's irrelevent how it is decloaked, if at all. Google has made it easy for your competitors to alert [google.com] them to cloaking activity. They could report you based on pure suspicion alone.
Can you pleas clarify your point here? It makes no sense to me.
If you don't understand this, you must be a newbie to the web.
I saw in your other post where you stated that you use spider fed keywords to promote the product you sell. If I'm looking for info on a product and I visit your site, I want the info your title and/or description alluded to- not just a pretty picture with a price tag on it. Now, if your descriptions clearly indicated that this product was for sale, I'd probably wouldn't bother clicking on it (unless I was interested in buying) but I wouldn't be irritated by it's presence either.
In other words, any food you feed that spider should be available in some form of textual content to the human visitor. If you can't do that, your keyword spamming the SE spider for your own financial gain.
It's a vague scenario but it's late, I'm tired, and I can't cite specific cloaking examples because it's not allowed under the TOS.
Looking over this thread, I see that, in the heat of it all, I missed one of your posts. That is the one timed at 8:04.
"The unethical part is adding things that communicate lies and blur the truth".
I totally agree with that. Of course, that seems, to me, to contradict your later assertion that any SEO cloaking is unethical.
I think that your concession of ethical cloaking, though, doesn't really address the point. I know there are other (non-EO) reasons to cloak. Even Google cloaks in the broader sense (just visit one of their search engine and look (from your user agent) like a spider). I am talking about cloaking for SEO purposes. Probably everybody would agree that cloaking (in the broad sense) will become the norm for professional websites in the future. Soom, I expect, cloaking (in the broad sense) will become almost mandatory (in the same way that virus scanners are now) to defend against email scrapers and other nusances. I think the issue is specifically SEO cloaking.
Your distinctions about the ethics of different SEO techniques are interesting.
All hidden text in unethical. But keyword stuffing in alt tags is just smart. I dont really see a clear distinction. Both seem to me to be techniques for enriching the keyword content of the page for the search engine artificially and hiding that (dare I say it?) spam fom the user.
My point is this. The ethical issue (if there is one) is not the technique. It is the content. If you are lying or trying to trick people, that, to me is unethical. I don't think that the fact that you are cloaking implies that, quid pro quo. Cloaking can be done accurately represent the contents of the page just as surely as alt tags can. And alt tags can distort the content just as cloaking can. Granted, can do both (or, I'm sure you would agree, the latter much more efficiently).
My original purpose for the post was to get a view of whether the way I do cloaking (which, I think, passes the relevance, not lying and not blurring the truth test) has a chance of surviving scrutiny by Google. I would still like to learn more, but I am encouraged (by some information I have received this evening) and am hoping that it might. That is good news for me.
For myself, I have enjoyed this dialog. I hope that you have too. I love a good discussion (so long as it stays rational) and doesn't devolve ot emontional outbursts and defensiveness. I think this has been a good discussion.
I must say, that, in the heat of the discussion, you went a bit far in, what I would call, your defense of irrationality. That idea is scary to me, because I know that people with different backgrounds and cultural heritiges often have different gut reactions to things and, personally, hold out the hope that rational discussion and analysis might help ferret all that out and help to promote "peace and harmony" (which I have fully and actively pursued throughout my life, BTW). I know that all this is in the heat of a spirited debate and such. but really, please reconsider your defense of irrationality. That we just "know" that we are right is one of the most destructive ideas in all of history - History is rampant with attrocities covered by that idea.
Actually, I don't think I qualify as a newbie. I do see, that I have been growing tired as this discussion has progressed (evidence: my typos - I apologize for those).
But, what you said there really doesn't make sense. You said "the vast majority of cloaked sites I have run across consisted of irrelevant spam and I hit the back button immediately." What??? Are we talking about the same thing? If the site is cloaked, you would not see that stuff on the human-readable page as seen through a browser. It doesn't sound like you are talking about a cloaked site. Or, you are looking at very stupid cloakers who put spam in the human viewable page. The point of cloaking is to present the spam to the spider and show a spam free human viewable page to humans. Maybe, you are in some kind of "de-cloaking mode" that I don't understand and you didn't explain clearly what you were trying to say...
And, of course I am "keyword spamming the SE spider for your own financial gain." This is SEO. Isn't all SEO spam?
We try to produce good spam. :-) I like to call it concentrated content. Our client's site, in this case, has lots of other stuff on it. The page is entirely too complex. Too much "noise". The spider food content contains the relevant content from the human viewable page. It leaves out the irrelevant verbage. And, for many pages, we have to describe the product more fully for the spider food page than is done on the human food page because the ecommerce page just doesn't have enough to say - it just allows people to cheaply purchanse a product they already know about. And, of course, our page titles are carefully constructed to qualify our visitors. We say clearly what we are selling. We want people who are want to buy the product, of course. Absolutely, we clearly indicate what the page offers to help the searcher qualify themselves. We don't want irrelevant visitors - we want to maintain a good rate of conversion.
I have to maintain these things which you challenged:
1. Cloaking (only if done well, I'll concede) offers the opportunity to produce a higher quality experience for the user because the content presented to the human user is not "burdened" with SEO considerations. That is, the page can be entirely focused on providing a quality human readable page without compromises for SEO purposes.
2. Cloaking (in the context of a small player staying under the "radar", is the safest SEO technique available. All the PR0s and penalties and fear evident every day in this forum attests to the perils of the non-cloaking techniques of mitigating the contradiction between the goal of achieving top SE rankings and and the goal of presenting a quality user experience. Our cloaked sites have not had these problems. We are able to present clean, simple and relevant content to the search engine spiders without having to resort to dangerous techniques that so many others have tripped up on.
I am carefully qualifying my statement on the safety of cloaking with the attribute of being done small scale and "under the radar". We have not had any trouble, in that mode with many sites over the course of over a year.
I will not make that statement about the safety of cloaking for a "successful" site with top positions in very competitive markets. In this case, you must move "above the radar" because you cannot hide the fact that you are cloaking from the search engines. My primary reason for all these posts this evening is to hear the experience of others in this regard. I want to be able to openly (in that the search engines know about it and accept it) cloak and I am trying to ascertain, in reality, if this is possible. So, the safety of "above the radar" cloaking is what I am trying to determine.
And, just a statement (a bit of a rant, I fear. But, I think it needs to be said) about my experiences and thoughts this evening before I go to bed. The term "cloaking" is clearly unfortunate and misleading. It really has too many nasty connotations. It implies dishonesty and hiding and I fear, it raises too much unwarrented subjective reaction. It only makes sense to address your audience. That is what cloaking allows. Isn't it obvious that cloaking will become inceasingly common in the future?
In the broader sense, we cloak for all of these reasons:
1. We serve concentrated content to the search engine spiders optimized for for seo purposes as has been discussed here.
2. It allows us to detect and reject nusiance visitors such as email scrapers and such. BTW, the amount of such visits has been increasing very swiftly over the last couple of months. I expect that, soon, this will be a major issue for all webmasters as the amount of these visitors approaches denial of service attack levels. But that is another topic.
3. The software we use for cloaking also allows us to detect friendly, non-search engine related spiders but include them in tracking for our PFC clients or to dilute the conversion rates for our Pay for conversion clients.
4. It allows us to deliver higher quality user experience by delivering web pages to our human visitors that is targetted only toward them and not compromized by SEO considerations.
Cloaking is a powerful tool that can (and inevitably will) improve the quality of the internet in many realms. The stigma of cloaking is mis-directed.
The stigma should be directed toward users of all techniques (including cloaking) that confuse and distort content in dishonest ways. I fear that the web is going the way of email where we are so innundated with spam and deceitful practices that the usefulness and functionality of the medium is compromised. To me currently fadish techniques like uninvited exit popups, irritating and distracting flashing gizmos and deceitful banner ads that attempt to trick you into irrelevant clicks are way more harmful than cloaking. They directly and openly degrade all of our experiences.
The classic bugaboo about cloaking is presenting radically different content to the spiders than to humans (spiders get spam about childs toys and humand get porn). What a straw dog and scare tactic! If anybody actually does that, of course they should be punished or something. But, really, SEO cloaking is not about that. SEO cloaking is about promoting web sites, primarily to make money. You don't make money attracting irrelevant traffic. In the main, people who cloak have to present relevant content to attract traffic interested in their product or service.
I am beginning to suspect that Google may understand this issue much better than many people on this forum. Lets focus our disdain on all of the gross spam out there that degrades the quality of the internet by whatever means (including cloaking). That is the real issue.
