Points for Improvements

[Milk]

One of the sites I was working on got G banned, I presume for cloaking although there may have been other factors...

For future projects, I was wondering if anyone could give pointers on how to effectively implement a cloaking initiative? Other than getting a good cloaking script, timely updates of IP lists, and nice templates for SEs.

I'm interested in knowing how to make cloaked sites less "footprintable" to people. Somehow the nocache option didn't do it for me :(

[volatilegx]

One thing you could do is make the optimimized version as close as possible to the version you display to human surfers.

[Milk]

In the G SERPs pages, where does G get the description to display for every listing? First X characters of what?

[volatilegx]

It depends on the circumstances. Sometimes the "snippet" Google displays under the title is pulled from the body text of the page near where the keyword searched for is. Other times Google uses the meta description. In some cases, it uses text not found on the page at all, perhaps getting it from what other web pages say about your page.

[Milk]

Thanks sir. So far I made a list of things to look out for. Please feel free to add to the list.

1. layouts for both page versions should be close.
2. HTML text (meta tags and in body) for both page versions should also be close.

Is this tantamount to saying that most of the on page optimization would have to be done "under" the page, e.g. hidden text, keywords in comments, etc. If all items come together, then it would probably be safe to have G cache everything right? That way I'd have one less cloaking clue available.

[volatilegx]

Is this tantamount to saying that most of the on page optimization would have to be done "under" the page, e.g. hidden text, keywords in comments, etc. If all items come together, then it would probably be safe to have G cache everything right? That way I'd have one less cloaking clue available.

I wouldn't think so. An optimized page can closely resemble a non-optimized page, layout-wise. I would never use hidden text or keywords in comments for an optimized page. An optimized page would simply have a higher keyword density than the regular page, and have keywords in more prominent locations.