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The only was to get to them is by our sitemap or through the serps...thanks
Cloaking is when you hide text. For example one type of cloaking would be making the text the same color as the background of your website. So only the search engines would see it.
It sounds to me that you are just creating doorway pages. There are good doorway pages and bad ones. Good doorway pages are pages created for the purpose of getting people to your website by just that page, but the page can be found by normal navigation. Like:
wwWebmasterWorldebsite.com/wedgets/blue-wedgets.html
The blue wegets page would be a good doorway page for blue wedgets. If you have a link from your home page to the wedgets page, then a link from there to the blue wedgets page; that would be a good doorway page for blue wedgets.
What your doing is creating a doorway page to try and fool the search engines. I would think of a way to make the link to your page a nessesary one.
Cloaking is when you hide text. For example one type of cloaking would be making the text the same color as the background of your website. So only the search engines would see it.
This is a very bad definition of cloaking -- do not rely on it. Cloaking has nothing to do with "hidden text". Cloaking is serving different content to a visitor of a web page based on the identity of the visitor. For more information on cloaking, see the "Updated Cloaking Primer [webmasterworld.com]".
The answer to your question is "no". What you are doing is not cloaking. CygnusX1 is right in that you are creating doorway pages, though.
We will add links to these pages on our site to be on the safe side. After reading googles guidelines they say "dont" cloak and "avoid" doorway pages so I assume that doorway pages arent as likely to get you penalized. We are serving up relevant info about our site so should I worry too much?
