Interview with Ralph Tegtmeier about cloaking

[patrick]

I don't know much about cloaking, but this interview might be of interest to some people:

http://www.searchengineblog.com/interviews/interview_ralph_tegtmeier.htm

Personally, I am to paranoid to cloak... last thing I want to do is get a client s-listed for my mistake.

[jeremy goodrich]

That was a pretty good read. After I read the one with Brett, I had hoped that there would be more interesting reading to come...definitely worth the time.

[patrick]

I agree, in the big picture I can't think of any good outcome from having software generated sites of 1,000's of fake pages.

[glengara]

We've had an interesting discussion on this in Doug's place.

[Chris_R]

I agree with those paranoid to cloak.

If you want to use tricks on the engines - go ahead and do so and take the risk, but cloaking just doesn't seem that effective to me.

Sure - in the days of meta tags and important text - it was important - today it is not.

Google knows that for a query of "goto" for example to list:

www.goto.com/
and
www.overture.com/

It never even crawls those pages because of robots.txt limitations.

Time spent on cloaking can be better spent on other stuff IMHO.

All you are going to do is get every one of your whining competitors to complain to google.

On the "everybody cloaks" argument...

Obviously this is not what google means.
Showing different ads/content bases on the user is not cloaking in the "evil" sense.
Showing a differnt page to the "search engine" is what they mean.

[johnser]

I have a client who is having a new site built consisting purely of popups. God knows why - <they like it>. No amount of argument or reasoning can convince them not to do this.

I'm basically left with no option other than to cloak in a highly ethical way just presenting the content that the spiders wouldn't be otherwise able to pick up.

Is that "evil"? Whats my alternative SEO strategy to compete on competitive phrases?
J

[jackofalltrades]

I got the impression that he felt that websites were about the technology or the sales and not actually providing information.

I liked the way he critised SE's one minute, by saying that they should in effect pay webmasters for spidering our sites, then the next minute his "ideal search engine" made no mention of paying money out...just bringing money in. ;)

Personally I thought the guy sounded like a hypocrit.

Bar the SE example, above he also critised SEO's as being preachy - which is exactly what he was doing as well.

I agree with patrick as well, there's no point to the fake pages other than to trick the search engines.

My 2c. :)

JOAT

[Jane_Doe]

> I agree, in the big picture I can't think of any good outcome from having software generated sites of 1,000's of fake pages.

The company I'm working at got a PR0 for having 600 of those. And the domain name was the company name - not an easy one to drop and get a new domain name. Fortunately the penalty got lifted when the pages got deleted.

There's another site I found because they link to one of my sites (yikes!), that has thousands of cloaked computer generated pages. I found the pages because they show up when I did a search to check to see who is linking to one of my pages.

However, when I pull up anyone of the sites, there are no links to my page and none of the text from the Google snippet. All of the thousand sites seem to have have identical content - pushing one commercial product. A spot check of 20 or so of the thousands of pages show they all also have PR0, so I don't know what good in the end all that tricky stuff got them. I'm just glad my poor innocent page didn't get a penalty, too, because of the links.

You can pick your friends, but you can't pick who links to you....

[rogerd]

I ran across a site like that which had stolen my page titles. It took a little while, but Google eventually blitzed them. I think many of these sites have a very short term strategy. If they can stay up for a month or two, they'll be profitable. A longer life (if nobody reports them) is pure gravy.

[bird]

Ok, so now that everybody and his sister has come to understand that autmatically generated doorway pages are likely to cause you more harm than benefit, that's the perfect moment for this "innovator" to launch a new product to create them by the thousands?

What else am I missing?