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My clients are begging me to implement cloaking scripts on their sites aswell as that is the only way I can think of to fight it. I don't want to, I think spam cloaking is dispicable but Google aren't leaving me much option.
What I don't understand is, that if their algorithm is so brilliant how come cloaked sites (the pages which are fed to the crawlers) have poor inbound links, low quality content, almost non-existent internal linking structure and yet they rank at the top? In my opinion, the pages that the cloaks feed to crawlers shouldn't rank highly even if they WERE the actual pages users were seeing!
It's very simple to remove this spam! Two simple criteria:
1) third level domain (kw1-kw2.domain.com)
2) NOARCHIVE
99% of these pages are spam (cloaking and redirecting).
To test this, you'll need an HTTP viewer that has a programmable User Agent.
I'll sticky an url to anyone wants to check this possibility.
Kaled.
The pages (like I said, the top 20-30 in some instances) are poorly optimized, hardly ranked to, not internally themed or anchored either and yet they are ranking high. The only factor is the cloaking, for some reason it feels like Google is giving extra marks for cloaking!
internetheaven, I'm sorry that you find my view derogatory. I simply believe that what you claim in this thread is wrong.
I found a perfect example today <snip>.
[edited by: ciml at 10:32 am (utc) on May 20, 2004]
[edit reason] Please see StickyMail. [/edit]
Too many are fond of saying "there is no spam..."
Cloaking can be reasonable and done with fair minded intent, or cloaking can be deceptive and spammy, as suggested by Liane's passage:
I found a cloaked site today (#1 of course) which delivered entirely different content to the search engine than that which the user sees. The text the search engine was fed was totally keyword stuffed! Heck, the webmaster didn't even bother trying to mimic the page the user sees. He just put up a text file using lots of H1 tags and a string of keywords followed by a couple of nonsensical paragraphs followed by another string of keywords.
Let's cut to the chase: The question should *not* be, "How can these sites be doing well?" That's sort of like asking "How can there still be war in modern, enlightened society?"
The only question you need to ask yourself is, do you wish to use cloaking as a weapon, or not.
If not, please re-read ciml's simple, excellent advice:
Well, I suggest you make that page that would get you to the top, then look at your human friendly page and see which aspects you forgot first time round.
If people are searching for Viagra and gets redirected to a viagra sponsor what's the problem?
If people are searching for online poker and gets redirected to a casino sponsor what's the problem?
Google's anti-spam meassures (florida/austin) actually caused the complete opposite. Extremely non relevant SERP's and annoyed surfers.
Maybe they could re-implement a scoring penalty on sites that had the nocache tag.
Page optimization has much less value these days.
It is not uncommon to find pages scoring top3 for "blue widgets" without having the word "blue widgets" on the page.
It's all about links.
Click the cache link and you will see the following:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: blue widgets
Wrong. When I click a SERP I want the content from that site. I don't want to be redirected to a related sponsor. Google is terrible a detecting this, and it degrades their SERPS.
Cloaking is only bad if the surfer gets redirected to unrelated commercial sites.
If that were true then why are the search engines on an all out war to remove Affiliate Marketing spam sites from their results?
The truth is that search engines want to be the ones doing the redirecting, not redirecting to a redirect. There is no point in an algorithm at all if the search engine is going to let the cloaker decide what is relevant.
