Cloaking

cloaking hide meta tags

[chiesa]

What is the general consensus on the use of cloaking to hide meta tags?

[jdMorgan]

chiesa,

If you mean you wish to hide your meta keywords, then why bother cloaking? As far as I know, the only major search engine that pays any attention to meta keywords is Inktomi, and even they don't give them much weight.

You would do well to find other, more modern and effective ways to improve your search results ranking. If you play cloaking games without a deep understanding of the rules, you will be caught and your domain name(s) banned. Even though some search engines may not be able to detect cloaking automatically, the guy you bump to number 2 in the results may investigate and find your cloak. One e-mail to the search engine, and your site is gone...

Be careful.

Jim

[FourDegreez]

Meta tags are completely useless for visitors, and yet they consume bandwidth. They only have meaning to spiders. Therefore, I don't even see how it would be spammy to only include them for spiders and exclude them from everyone else (if pages are dynamic). But I'm not a search engine spam filter designer, so what do I know.

[Alternative Future]

Why would you want to hide the Meta tags?

If it is so that your competitors don't know what you are using - then this serves no purpose as in the real world your Meta keywords are your site/page content!

Just my two pence 8)

-gs

[creative craig]

They only have meaning to spiders

In the SES conference in Boston, the only panel member who said yes they still read and pay attention to the meta keyword tag was Inktomi.

[FourDegreez]

So are you suggesting that the trend is to abandon meta tags completely? Are people abandoning them in practice, or just saying that they're probably not useful while continuing the use them "just to be safe"? One of my focuses is to cut page filesizes to a minimum, so I'm wondering if I should waste precious bytes on these tags.

[Alternative Future]

I think the bytes you would save on a non-spamming Meta tag wouldn't make much difference.

-gs

[creative craig]

Three months ago I redesigned a site completely from the ground up and havent included keyword tags on any of the pages (250+ pages).

The site traffic has doubled every month for the last two months, so I would say that it hasnt harmed me in any way that I can see, this is just my story though, others may have different opinions and tales :)

[Tinks]

What's the point in having a book without a title on the cover?
Same as METAtags surley.

[Jock Philips]

By the way, what are spiders and what the conection to meta tags, is this another name for cloaking?

[creative craig]

A spider is a robotic program that a search engine uses to crawl the web and look at and download pages for a possable inclusion into the index.

People used to stuff the meta keyword tag full of keywords in a hope that it could boost their rankings in a search engine, this doesnt work any more as the se's got wise to it and dont pay alot of attenon ot the tag any more.

AFAIK this isnt a form of cloaking, cloaking is when you have two different versions of a page for different uses. One for a search engine spider maybe and one for a surfer.

Craig

[Tinks]

Hi Jock Phillips
When considering the function of Meta Tags, it helps to compare a website to an old fashion book (remember those paper things that we all used to read before the Internet). The first part of any Meta Tag is the "Title" tag. The Title tag is very similar to the title of a book, it gives a visitor the first hint as to the theme of the website. The next section of any Meta Tag is the "Description" tag. The Description tag is comparable to the summary found on the back of a book, providing a brief guide to the content of your website. The last part of any Meta Tag is the "Keywords" tag. The Keywords are similar to the index of a book, allowing anyone to clearly see if the website contains the information they are seeking. If you compare a search engine to a bricks-and-mortar library, with millions of books you'll hopefully have a good understanding as to relevance of Meta Tags for your website.

[edited by: Tinks at 7:30 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2003]

[Tinks]

Hi Jock Phillips
Spider is:
The main program used by search engines to retrieve web pages to include in their database
METAtags:
Author generated HTML commands that are placed in the head section of an HTML document. Current popular meta tags that can affect search engine rankings, are Meta Keywords, and Meta Description.
Meta KEYWORDS tag is used to group a series of words that relate to a website. These tags can be used by search engines to classify pages for searches.

The Meta DESCRIPTION is used to describe the document. The meta description is then displayed in search engine results.

[creative craig]

Tinks the search engine dont pay any attention to the meta keyword tag any more, the only one that does is Inktomi.

This was confirmed at the SES conference in Boston :)

Craig

[tbear]

You should include the title tag.