The State of SEO.

I thought I knew something....

[Dave Stewart]

Guys,
bear with me here. I'm new to the forum. In fact, I've never posted to a forum before, but I've been observing for a couple of days. So, I'll just jump right in. I've been doing SEO for about 9 months. I started with WPG. Up until a couple of months ago, this and [searchenginewatch.com...] is all I knew. Until a couple of days ago, I thought cloaking was pure evil, bad, you'll get caught, it'll give you cancer, etc. Then I find a forum, which lead me to another, which lead me to this one. I my reading over the past week, I started thinking cloaking might be what everyone successful might be using. Then I started thinking the other way again.
Meanwhile, I got out biggest client banned from AV because I had "...machine/program generated pages...considered to be spam..." Naturally, I freaked out. I'm sure that most of you have been where I am right now. And I'm counting on you guys for help, please?
1. Any machine generated page is bad, right?
2. If I use WPG for reporting, can they track my IP? (call me paranoid.)
3. Is it just a matter of time before you get caught cloaking?
4. How do you get a good quality list of spiders?
Guys, please accept my appology for the length. I am distraught, and I call on your good nature to give some guidance and some peace of mind.
Thanks,
DS

[Mike_Mackin]

In this business there is no "peace of mind"

However, there is a lot of help here.

Create lots of good content.

[rcjordan]

Dave, welcome to WebmasterWorld. WPG and Cloaking are not my forte', so I'll just tell you that you're at the right place.

Edited by: rcjordan

[oilman]

Welcome Dave.

1. Any machine generated page is bad, right?
It's a good general rule. WPG are the worst. Build your own and make them with the look and feel of the site. It really doesn't take that long.
2. If I use WPG for reporting, can they track my IP?
If they want. Right now it's not too bad. Google was doing it for awhile but they seem to have stopped and I believe Northern Light has blocked it altoghether.
3. Is it just a matter of time before you get caught cloaking?
Depends on how good you are. Cloaking takes alot of time and effort. Even if you get caught it might not be a bad thing - as long as you are not being misleading.
4. How do you get a good quality list of spiders?
Go here [searchengineworld.com].

>>Guys, please accept my appology for the length.
No worries - as posts go this was pretty short. ;)

[Mike_Mackin]

Dave:

Does that prove that people care here?

{never saw anything like it - lol]

[Dave Stewart]

Thanks for the quick responses.

I should add this. I think what has happened is, I created several pages with similar content. In other words, I created a page for one SE and KW, then created another page for the same KW but different SE. The content was similar, which I think is what ticked AV off. Am I right?

[Q]

Originally posted by Mike_Mackin
Quote "In this business there is no "peace of mind""
He gets my vote for quote of the week.

Yeah Dave, it sounds like you fell into the "similar or identical content" trap. If you are creating different pages for different SE's you need to serve the pages to the corresponding SE (ie cloaking). Check out the cloaking-stealth forum for some great info. on cloaking try This thread [webmasterworld.com] and This Thread [webmasterworld.com] for starters.

[Dave Stewart]

Would a robots.txt have helped me out? If so, would I need to keep on my toes updating agent names/IP's as much as if I were cloaking?

I do have a couple good programmers at my discretion, but they don't know optimization, and I don't know PERL. Would ASP be another alternative? I know an ASP programmer who's convinced it would.

[Air]

You can cloak using ASP no problem, and if you know someone that can do the ASP coding you're ahead of the game.

robots.txt is being ignored by some engines from time to time, so I no longer view it as a reliable means of keeping engines away from pages I don't want indexed.

[Dave Stewart]

Do you know much about ASP Air? I don't. My friend is convinced I can learn in a short time. I just need to know whether to invest the time, since I'm so short of it these days.

The only other issue with ASP is, some of the sites I optimize for are Domino databases, which is why they need help with SEO. The problem here is that the Domino is intalled on an NT server and there's evidently some sort of conflict installing the two, or I think he said something about installing IIS, which causes a problem. I honestly can't remembr which, but there is a problem, of that I'm sure. ;-)

[Air]

Dave,

I Don't know a lot about ASP, seen lot's of it, tried a little, a lot like PHP. But I have an aversion to NT/IIS and prefer *nix/Apache, cgi, etc. So I can't be much help with ASP.

Yeah you will have a conflict with Domino and IIS because Domino is in itself a web server. Domino of course being the successor to Lotus/IBM Notes uses that structure underneath for some web content, as far as I know it is mostly used on intranet sites that already had a Notes base. It is expensive to develop for and notoriously difficult to promote to SE's. But I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.

I guess bottom line is I can't be of much help on that platform, but someone else who knows more than I on this hopefully will be able to help.

[drbill]

Dave,

One thing that I will tell you is that with cloaking you had better be up on your IPs. The best place to ask all about the how to,s and dont's is here [webmasterworld.com]

Have a look you will not be dissapointed