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Thanks to all.
If you plan to cloak, plan to be caught and penalized eventually, most likely your competition ratting you out.
Cheat and you'll have short term success and long term failure, many threads of banned domains in WebmasterWorld for tricks played on search engines that get caught.
Play by the rules you may fare well.
If you want to CLOAK, and not do redirects (which are different), and cloak successfully, then get yourself several different domains and run IP-based cloaking software on them. Forward your human traffic to another domain. If a cloaked domain is penalized... so what? Domains are cheap. Set up five more.
If your page contains a redirect, then chances are the page will not do well in the SEs.
If you want to CLOAK, and not do redirects (which are different), and cloak successfully, then get yourself several different domains and run IP-based cloaking software on them. Forward your human traffic to another domain. If a cloaked domain is penalized... so what? Domains are cheap. Set up five more.
well,
but,is it worth (considering that is a hard work)to entrust to the cloaking the promotion of a web site? Is it really effective for the short as well as for the long term?
Cloaking is hard work? News to me. I hear plenty of anecdotal evidence that cloaking works great in the short term. As a long term strategy it is effective as long as you recognize its limitations. You don't want to cloak pages on your main "non-throwaway" domain.
Cloaking is hard work? News to me.
I mean that is hard to prepare different pages with different codes,tags and contents for each SE and for each keyword isn't it?
As average ,for my web site I would to prepare more than 50 pages!
You don't want to cloak pages on your main "non-throwaway" domain.
what do you mean with "non-throwaway domain"?
Thanks
As an example, I use a template engine for a dynamic site I have, so I have one template but I leave stuff out for spiders.
Thanks for the explaination Vabtz.
If you want to CLOAK, and not do redirects (which are different), and cloak successfully, then get yourself several different domains and run IP-based cloaking software on them. Forward your human traffic to another domain. If a cloaked domain is penalized... so what? Domains are cheap. Set up five more.
if I want to start with cloaking "process" for my web site how do I do?
Thanks
[webmasterworld.com...]
It is not something to get into unless you really know what you are doing!
Look at this example:
Page 1 for Yahoo - excluding Google and MSN robots
Page 2 for Google - excluding MSN and Yahoo robots
Page 3 for MSN - excluding Yahoo and Google robots
Do,in this way SE recognize duplicate content or cloaking?
I mean that is hard to prepare different pages with different codes,tags and contents for each SE and for each keyword isn't it?
As average ,for my web site I would to prepare more than 50 pages!
What if I make a "mini-cloaking",preparing only three pages for three different SEs excluding selectively robots for each one?
You don't exclude robots from seeing different pages. What you do is detect which robot is trying to view the page and then your cloaking program grabs a template or displays content made specifically for that search engine.
Back in 98/99 on-page optimization was everything and you needed to create different pages for infoseek, altavista, webcrawler etc. Now off-page factors count much more heavily, things like number of links, link text etc.
In some cases only one template is needed. It really depends on which keywords you're trying to target.
You need to know how to evaluate the level of effort needed to rank well.
As has been stated many times before. Cloaking does not guarantee top rankings, it just hides what you are doing. You still need to know some SEO.
Yes and that brings me back to my original point. I was looking at cloaking, but I decided not to for now simply because AFAIK the major SE's, especially Google count off page for way more.
C.K.
AFAIK the major SE's, especially Google count off page for way more.
What do you mean?
I think he means off page factors i.e. inbound links, PR of site linking to you, anchor text in those links.
However, I have found that you can cloak a site with a good IP cloaking script and still get good results without off page factors. These are usually less competitve terms but still convert to cash - which is what its all about for me.
Sticky me if you want to know about real cloaking scripts.
[google.com...]
PS, I'm glad to see some people answering how and not why you should cloak...at least this thread contains some useful information and is not entirely used a pedestal for people to preach their opinions.
this thread contains some useful information and is not entirely used a pedestal for people to preach their opinions.
I totally agree. Its nice to see the "old style" webmasterworld in process - where people give advice and try and stick with the question rather than pass opinions which are too subjective.
When I started lurking here at WebmasterWorld about 2 years ago I was overwhelmed by the amount of INFOMATION passed on. Opinions/moral dilemas/preaching was (at that time) at a minimum.
Cloaking is just one of many options open to webmasters and like everthing else to be successful at it you need to invest time and effort to get the best results from it.
I run many sites and put varying amounts of effort into each one. The site that needs the least effort and gives the best results (traffic/profit wise) is a cloaked site.
I have plans to create a lot more cloaked sites in future - I think it gives me the edge in a world where the little guy is gettting squeezed out.
In the case of IP based cloaking you need some kind of a spider trap that will check the user agent of the spider and then compare the IP of that spider against your current list of spiders. If there is a spider using a new IP send an email alert to yourself and search forum 11 to see if others have seen this new IP.
Here [webmasterworld.com] is a good thread on how to identify search engine spiders.
Tapolyai posted on 2:02 pm on Mar 14, 2005What if I have the same pages displayed for spiders as humans, EXCEPT for bold, h1, etc. and the images are not there, maybe the CSS is dropped, etc?
I realise it may be off the original question, but I am interested in an answer to Tapolyai's question too. Perhaps admin might see fit to move this to a new thread.
What does everybody think? My instinct is to suggest same content different format is no abuse of cloaking and thus no penalties even if caught. But I have heard other threads suggest very different.
MattyUK
What does everybody think? My instinct is to suggest same content different format is no abuse of cloaking and thus no penalties even if caught. But I have heard other threads suggest very different.
Opinions are mixed on what constitutes "bad cloaking". There is no rule of thumb to follow, because the search engines claim all cloaking is bad. I believe it is really decided on a case-by-case basis, with a hand delivered penalty. If the page is different when viewed by a spider, and the reviewer thinks it was done to improve search engine rankings, then you may get a penalty.
Thanks for your response.
MattyUK
