Cloaking And Gateways

Still In Vogue?

[austtr]

When I last spent considerable time here (quite a while ago) there was a lot of debate, some quite emotive, about the use of cloaking and gateway pages. Needless to say there were lots of arguments for and against.

Nowdays, the cloaking forum seems to be hardly ticking over and I can't recall seeing the word "gateway" at all in recent times.

What has changed? Is cloaking now so well understood that everyone is doing it and don't need to discuss it anymore? ..... OR ... has it generally disappeared from the SEO landscape.

Gateways? - now too expensive with most SE's being pay-to-play?

Has SE technology improved to a point where they can detect and penalise abuses?

Can anyone bring me up to speed on these subjects? A quick overview will be OK.

[Air]

I think in general neither gateways nor cloaking has declined, but both have changed. Gateways now have links to and form other pages so that they look more like valuable content to spiders.

Cloaking has become so mainstream, and yet still controversial, that IMO those that do it would rather not attract any attentention, it has become very quiet. Mostly it is in the hands of those that know what they are doing. Most newbies have been scared off, or made mistakes with cloaking and abandoned it.

SE technology has not improved much, it still hates flash, query strings, imbedded javascript, and css. What is going on with Gateways and Cloaking is pretty much a reflection of what is going on with SEO in general.

[mosio]

I agree with Air! In general "gateway pages" have not declined. I think some other keyphrases such as "doorway pages" are being used for that issue.

I also think web marketers approach to that issue has changed. As mentioned by meisinator in the Google and Doorway/Gateway Pages forum, Gateway/Doorway pages are no longer clones of a home page but they are kind of home pages for a specific topic in a site.

[richlowe]

I agree about gateway pages. I have a site with a .net TLD which is my main entrance. This gets submitted to search engines and such. Then I have a .US TLD for the "US (patriotic)" entrance, a .INFO TLD for an informational slant and a .BIZ TLD for a business related slant. ALl of these other pages link back to the .NET version, all are on different domain names.

I do not actually do this for search engine optimization. I do it to allow me to have different email and other promotional campaigns with different flavors.

Richard Lowe

[mosio]

I need an advice regarding cloned pages. Usually I do not recommend or use that internet marketing strategy. However, one of my new clients already has the same company web site with 4 different hosting companies, and each hosting company has two domain names as a testing process to check which one works better. Until now, the domain names are all up, and some of them are well ranked in the search engines. I am afraid they could be blocked or taken out of the search engines. How can I avoid that? Will the search engines allow the cloned web sites if they have different IP addresses? DNS? Does it matter? If I change the content (text) a little bit but keep the exact web design is that somehow helpful. I will appreciate all the recommendations regarding this issue!