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Ron C
Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 04:20
Fred, I mean this in the nicest possible way ... I have this bridge in New York, with tons of heavy traffic, and no one has ever challenged my ownership of it. I can sell it to you real cheap?
Anyone who tells you they can recognize a spider without fail is either lying to you or is totally incompetent. Software that can't be fooled has never been written. THAT is what makes cloaking software possible, after all. 
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SmartROI
Joined: Nov 18, 2003
# Posts: 288
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 04:29
Ron C
I like your writing style and I respect what you have to say, I simply disagree. You are good at making your point. The manner in which you create a sentence is quite authoratitive and demands respect.
Nevertheless, I must point out the following. The anti-cloaking stance came because of the people who would trick the people who were looking for terms such as cooking recipes but were getting locked into a porn site. The cloakers would use forwarding techniques that would prevent somebody from being able to successfully go back to the search engine, and in some cases pop up windows would take over the user's system. I remember the first time this happened to me. I was looking for information about El Nino, and my computer was basically taken over by the offending page.
However, that is unaccepted regardless of how they achieve their goal. It's quite clear that people can take just about any topic and create a web page on it, and then re-route the traffic using non-cloaking techniques. Something as simple as a javascript could do this. I remember when people would put words such as Britney Spears and sex into their meta tags, just to get people to visit. This happened on sites all the time, especially those that had nothing to do with pop culture or sex.
Google's "florida" update should give everybody a sense of the kind of contempt that Google now has for any and every possible tool or technique that may inflate the rankings of any particular page for any particular phrase. So much so, that they would penalize sites that were following the very basics of modern "ethical" search engine optimization as well as sites that had little to no SEO work at all.
I asked the makers of IP-Delivery about cloaking last year and here's what they had to say.
"Q: Has Google ever said anything positive regarding cloaking?
A: Yes, the first time was when one of their founders Sergey Brin, commented on it at the first search engine strategies conference. He publicly stated that it was fine and would even recommend it for some sites. This was just after Google launched very early in their history.
Since that point in time Google has made a point of publicly saying no to cloaking. Privately they generally acknowledge that it's not always a bad thing, but they do not want to recommend it to people because they believe most people use it in an abusive manner. They realize and understand that there are a large number of companies, many of them their advertisers, that use the technology and it is not causing any harm in many cases. I doubt at this point that they will ever go on record as recommending it again, there are many people that abuse Google and they want to keep their problems to a minimum - which is understandable.
Q: We're not trying to deceive people, but we want to cloak our pages in order to protect ourselves from competitors, plus search engines just hate dhtml, javascript, flash, etc. Additionally, we will rank better with text only pages. What do you think about this?
A: That's the entire idea behind it. As long as you use it responsibly and use it with the surfer’s best interests in mind we've never seen a problem with its use.
Cloaking software is most often used in commercial areas of highly competitive fields such as travel, software, and real estate. While it is somewhat controversial -- particularly among those who understand it least -- cloaking is in fact used very successfully by many web sites ranging in size from small companies to many Fortune 500s. It is the best way we know of to prevent copyright theft and code jacking while enabling a company to optimize relevant pages for the search engines. Proper use of cloaking can greatly assist your customers in finding and receiving the most relevantly useful information on the topics for which they are searching in a format that is most compatible to their browsing platform and their geographical region."
---------end
I might add my experience to this. I have had a couple of sites penalized for 3 or 4 months, to return later right back where they started. I've had sites where somebody has even bragged to me about reporting, and the sites are better off today than ever, with page rank and everything. I think it all comes out to appropriate content. If you are delivering someone to the exact page they need, for the exact product or service that they are looking for, then who's being harmed by the fact that it's through a cloaked page? The search engines are delivering relevant results, the user is getting what they want, and the developer is getting the traffic they want. A win win win situation.
Anti-cloakers are hypocritical in most cases. They'll report cloakers and bash them publicly... but then they'll turn around and try to buy links, buy page rank links, and other attempts to gain artificial forms of link popularity, and/or create all types of worthless words at the top, bottom, and behind imagery and flash in order to get the keyword density and link popularity they think they need to rank highly. It's no different other than the fact that one's a hypocritical approach hiding behind the "ethical" banner while the other delivers people to exactly what they are looking for (when done correctly) and to a page that is designed to provide the user with a fulfilling and user-friendly interface.
I hope I can bring this perspective to the forum. So often I'll go into a forum who's administrators are so grounded into their beliefs that they refuse to let other opinions be expressed (whether it be politics, religion, or SEO), but it seems that JimWorld is a friendly place for just about anybody.
Additionally, I'd like to bring up a comment about "database of which ip addresses are being used by the spiders." You just need Google and maybe Inktomi. That's it. Focus on those two search engines and you'll do fine. It doesn't take much to figure out their I.P ranges, just watch the logs. All that other stuff is just sales hype to justify the monthly renewal fees. I do agree that I can't imagine a good script for only a couple hundred bucks.
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Ron C
Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 06:23
You make some very good points, SmartROI, many of which find me nodding my head in agreement. Yes, tricking searchers into visiting wholly irrelevant sites hurts everyone involved. Yes, most of the abuses associated with cloaking can be (and have been) accomplished with more mundane methods. And, yes, buying (or even trading) links is, at best, questionable and, at worst, hypocritical. Good points, all, and very well stated.
And, yes, of course cloaking can be justified. The fact is that human beings can convincingly justify just about anything they really want to do (heck, just look at our politicians). I hope you'll note that I haven't argued against any of the justifications presented by either yourself or Fred? Nor have I tried to play the ethical/unethical card. I could contend, I suppose, that you've already admitted sending someone to an irrelevant site is bad, so it logically follows that sending someone to a potentially LESS relevant site than is available can't be good? But I haven't done that in earlier posts, and I won't do it now. 
My arguments against cloaking are purely pragmatic.
Those without a good understanding of the technology usually think cloaking is an "easy" way into the top SERPs. It's not and never has been. It does little good to cloak a poorly optimized page, and it takes just as much SEO knowledge to optimize a cloaked page as it does an uncloaked one. The only thing cloaking eases is the admittedly difficult job of integrating your optimizations into copy that also can sell, but cloaking only replaces that burden with a different one. Learning to successfully cloak isn't just a matter of buying a script, at least not in any field that is even moderately competitive, and those who depend only on a script are going to get busted pretty quickly.
Cloaking isn't a silver bullet. Those who cloak will invest just as much time, skill, effort, and money as those who don't cloak, and with no more assurance of success. The one thing they ARE assured of is eventual failure. Even more so than hidden text or duplicate content, because it's more easily thwarted, cloaking is a technology without a future. It cannot last.
Run a search on any highly competitive keyword. Travel. Real estate. Doesn't matter. The day you can do that and convince me that every single one of the first ten results is a cloaked page, then and only then will I admit that cloaking technology can be justified. But as long as natural, non-cloaked pages can still make the Top Ten -- without worrying about someone stealing their source code, without worrying about writing stilted copy that doesn't sell, without worrying about DHTML or Flash -- then I'll continue to believe that cloaking is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
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SmartROI
Joined: Nov 18, 2003
# Posts: 288
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 08:31
"The one thing they ARE assured of is eventual failure. Even more so than hidden text or duplicate content, because it's more easily thwarted, cloaking is a technology without a future. It cannot last."
I disagree. For every site that gets shut down, 10 more pop up in it's place. For every measure that Google takes, there is a counter-measure strategy that can be developed, if not simply programmed. And keep in mind that if a search engine does something within a pattern, the cloaked page can be programmed to counter that pattern. In fact the changes can often be made across every page instantly.
Here is where you can get a point though. If a domain is an orphan (no parent links) or if a domain using a particular link strategy, then obviously the "florida" update has proven to be an effective counter-measure by Google, but this doesn't necessarily have to do with cloaking... this is about linking. The point comes from the fact that most cloaked pages have a hard time getting good links unless the index page is part of a real site. (some cloakers use entirely phantom domains)
"so it logically follows that sending someone to a potentially LESS relevant site than is available can't be good?"
Well, Google's results are simply an opinion. Many people disagree quite a bit with that opinion. Additionally... a guy once wrote (I wish I could find his page) that there's a thousand New York City Hotels. What makes any one of them more relevant than another when you search for "New Your City Hotels?" Why do the top ten get to be the top ten when they are no more relevant than the other 990?
I never said that cloaking was an easy way out. In fact it's quite the opposite. You can buy a keyword and pay a few cents to a few dollars a click and be live in less than 15 minutes on Adwords. Quite the contrary with cloaking. In fact, I would say that cloaking can be harder than natural non-cloaked seo. Cloakers aren't trying to rank on 10 somewhat obscure words on a couple search engines so that they can jilt someone out of $1000 or so and move on to the next guy. Cloaking requires more keyword research and a great deal more tenacity in my opinion.
"Run a search on any highly competitive keyword. Travel. Real estate. Doesn't matter. The day you can do that and convince me that every single one of the first ten results is a cloaked page, then and only then will I admit that cloaking technology can be justified."
Well, what do you consider to be cloaking? Would you consider a page that changes content based on the location or I.P. address of the user to be cloaking? Visit Google.com from France and you'll see French results, in French of course. (on the actual Google.com site)
What about user-agent cloaking? Visit Apple.com from a PC and then visit it from a Mac. There are hundreds of reasons to cloak. Many have nothing to do with search engines, but ALL of them have to do with the user's experience.
Cloaking can allow you to display a pop up on natural searches from Google and Overture PPC, but restrict the pop up from Adword searches.
Cloaking can display data to your competitors that would restrict them from viewing your prices. In fact I had an hour long conversation today with a friend who said that he spends $40K a month advertising on PriceGrabber. (50c click) He said that about 20 to 25% of his traffic is from competitors looking to compare his prices with his inventory and so forth. He knows this, because he's been able to track down their I.P's because they visit so frequently. Imagine how cloaking could save this guy $5K to $10K a month by giving his competitors nothing to look at and no reason to return.
I also think that search engine cloaking is better served with secondary keywords. For instance, Travel would be practically impossible for just about anybody, but Chicago Travel would be a good candidate. The advantage to cloaking when it's done right, is that you can serve up 1000 pages instead of slaving away over 10. But using any distributed cloaking software always gives Google the opportunity to look for the auto-generation trends.
You may have 2000 keywords that average 1 visit a day, versus having 5 keywords that get 2000 visits a day. The difference is that with the cloaked pages, the searches are usually more precise and you can deliver a more highly targeted (and usability tested) page and get a better ROI. With the 5 more competitive keywords, you spend more time on link buying/trading strategies or pay per click.
I know of a site that has had over 4,000 top 10 rankings with over 1,100 of them #1. Not bad at all. It averaged about 2,000 visits a day. This would of cost at least $200 a day on Overture, and since there is no incentive to click (Overture/Gator/Affiliates, etc...) there was no waste of money.
There are no easy answers, but as you see by Google's "florida" update, even the linking strategies can be thwarted to some degree.
In regards to whether or not you would admit that cloaking technology can be justified. Well, cloakers don't need you to do that. In fact they'd probably prefer that you didn't. Most don't need nor want your justification (or competition) as long as they're making over $10K a month.
I for one, well I'd prefer to just be a writer. (Isn't that obvious?) Wow, I can't believe it's almost 3am. Thanks for keeping me up all night Ron. Sheesh. ;-)
[ Message was edited by: SmartROI 12/09/2003 12:47 am ]
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Duckman
Joined: Nov 13, 1999
# Posts: 37
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 09:48
One thing that strikes me is that you can achieve more or less the same results by using "legit" approaches, such as tableless design and CSS. Or no?
The whole point with cloaking, as I understand it, is to display the content of the site, right? Well, using CSS for positioning instead of tables drastically reduces the site code, enables you to put the content at the top, makes your site load much faster, and on top of that, there's NO reason why SEs would ban you.
And as if that wasn't enough, if you're making a site from scratch, using CSS is far more cost effective than using the old table-approach. Let alone cross platform and browser compatibility etc...
Something to think about, eh?
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SmartROI
Joined: Nov 18, 2003
# Posts: 288
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Posted: 2003-Dec-09 17:40
CSS is good stuff. But the design isn't the only reason for cloaking. However, CSS might work well for a good hybrid. - Thanks for the idea.
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Duckman
Joined: Nov 13, 1999
# Posts: 37
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Posted: 2003-Dec-10 07:19
SmartROI, you say not only for the design? Enlighten me, please?
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SmartROI
Joined: Nov 18, 2003
# Posts: 288
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Posted: 2003-Dec-10 19:04
Duckman
Please see my other messages in this thread. It should give you a good idea. I'm all "authored" out right now.
Thanks.
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toplinker
Joined: Aug 21, 2004
# Posts: 1
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Posted: 2004-Aug-21 23:09
Hi
Wondering if you have any updates about well Fantomaster works with the new google updates and if it really works
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iixvaderxii
Joined: Sep 04, 2004
# Posts: 2
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Posted: 2004-Sep-04 22:44
Hello my name is Paul and I own BuyPcMods.com and several other web sites and I am angry. Search engine cloaking, search engine redirecting or any other trick used to fool a search engine is not ethical. The people / webmasters that use these cloaking and redirecting methods are the people who are hurting the internet, search engines and most importantly small business owners such as myself.
A person that will use these programs and techniques are lazy, poor designers, definitely bad optimizers and very far from professionals. Let's face it, with all the open source available such as OsCommerce, anyone can create an ecommerce or standard web site with a 30 trial from Dreamweaver and a few hours of time. But what do you think? Would you rather see; a web site like mine that has impeccable graphics design, relevant content and products that ranks #25 in a search engines; or a site that was hastily thrown together with poor content and poor graphics that is full of click through ads that just make someone else money by ranking #1 and pushing my site to #25? This is what these programs and or people that use these programs do.
Let me put it into perspective for you. If 100 people bought this type of cloaking software and gained 5000 listings each that all promote one site. That would mean these 100 people now have 500,000, yes Five Hundred Thousand fake, cloaked search engine results to compete with. Can you see how this can hurt my and your ethical web business / web site that has the correct amount of search listings that all correspond to the correct URL?
The days are numbered for cloakers and redirects. Do you think Yahoo likes these sites? Their spiders and crawlers do, because they are fooled. These said companies openly admit they fool the spiders. When someone fools you into something that is unethical. Do you let it happen again, or do you do things to make sure you are not fooled again?
A final thought from me is this:
A lot of people get into ecommerce for all the wrong reasons and these programs are just another reason to get in without "working". Yes I said "working". Don't get too scared, I know the majority of self proclaimed webmasters are lazy people that think because they can accept credit cards online they are a company. I personally have put in well over 1000 hours of work into my network as of January 2004. When you search Yahoo for "Buy Pc Mods" you will find my site. This also goes for the majority of the items I sell. Not because I fool a search engine, not because I spam but because it deserves to be there. As search engines and people like myself notice more and more of these cloaked pages outranking GOOD web sites in search engine results like many of my associates have been noticing (For example in Yahoo if you search for "CPU Mods" you will see the #1 results page "cache" is a Redirect. My associates web site CPUmods.com has been pushed to #3 because of this.) they will be penalized and or removed from the search index.
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Fred
Joined: Oct 13, 2000
# Posts: 8
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Posted: 2004-Sep-05 00:08
Hi, I'm the one who originally started this thread.
I changed my mind about cloaking and decided not to get involved with it long ago. You're right, it's not very ethical and the risk is too great.
I later found out the other affiliate who was making $ix figure$ promoting the same affiliate program as me, was never even using cloaking in the first place.
Fred
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secloaker
Joined: Sep 08, 2004
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2004-Sep-08 22:39
My name is Peter and I am the owner of searchenginecloaker. I have decided to post to respond, as several people have contacted me about the posts here.
I often go to Thailand. When I am in Thailand, and I go to google.com, you know what I see? I don't see the regular Google home page I am familiar with. Instead, I see the Google home page in Thai! Wait a second? What is going on here?! Is this cloaking? You see, Google recognized my IP address as from Thailand, and invisibly redirected me to content it thought was better suited for me.
Our cloaking software does exactly the same as this Google example. It looks at incoming users. If the user is a search engine spider, it will deliver them content that is optimized for the engines. If the user is a "real human user", it will automatically redirect them to content that is optimized for them.
Why do Web sites need to do this? Well, Google and the other search engine kings are king-makers. And, increasingly, to get traffic to your site, you MUST DESIGN YOUR SITE FOR THE ENGINES. Too often, however, such "search engine friendly" sites are NOT friendly to end-users. If you look at the top-ranked pages of top "ethical" optimizers, you will note that they are barely readable... keywords are repeated over and over, the content is turgid, and so on.
As such, Cloaker lets you separately design content that will do well for the engines, and content that will do well for actual users. That's all.
Cloaker is simply a TOOL. And like any tool, it CAN be used unethically (using keywords unrelated to your site). And, remember, unlike email spam, we do not actively go to the engines and demand or trick them into putting our content into their indexes. Rather, we respond to THEIR REQUESTS TO OUR SERVERS for content. Are we under any obligation to deliver them a particular set of content? Aren't these our servers? And can't we deliver them content we feel is best suited TO THEM? (Just like Google recognizing I am in Thailand and delivering Thai content to me.)
[Per TOS, signature removed]
[ Message was edited by: thejenn 09/14/2004 11:37 am ]
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Ron C
Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 00:17
Welcome to SEF, Peter!
Comparing cloaking to geo-targeting is a fairly common argument, even though I suspect we all intuitively know there's a difference. Dig a little deeper behind the intuition, and I think that difference becomes apparent. When Google or any other site uses geo-targeting, they are attempting to deliver the content the visitor most wants. When a cloaked site delivers a page to a search engine that the real visitors will never see, they are delivering precisely what the SE does NOT want. A better analogy, then, would be if you were in California and Google served you only Chinese pages. Chance are you will feel a bit cheated, which is much more comparable to how Googlebot might feel.
Your point about writing content that is both SE friendly and user friendly is also a common one, but this time I think it's a valid argument. It definitely isn't easy and, frankly, most optimized sites fail miserably at it. The answer to the problem, however, isn't necessarily cloaking.
Those sites, in my opinion, would be much better served hiring a professional copywriter that is also skilled in search engine technology. There's not a lot of them, but they do exist, and they can not only integrate the two needs but will usually address both needs on one page better than an unskilled writer can do with two different pages. A good copywriter will not only get the page ranked well, they will help most sites sell MORE products, too.
Best of all, well written copy is a long-term solution. I've yet to hear of Google banning anyone for writing too good.
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secloaker
Joined: Sep 08, 2004
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 00:47
Our customers use our software to deliver content appropriately to the engines. Some examples of valid uses of Cloaking (note: these are not necessarily users of our software):
1. You have a Members' Area that you want the spiders to crawl and index, but that you don't want regular users to see without paying. A good example of something like this is Medscape, that has its pages indexed in Google, but, when you click on them, you are prompted to sign-up before looking at their content. Cloaker allows Webmasters to deliver their Members' Area content to the engines, but to prevent users from seeing it for free beforehand.
2. You have a graphics rich or graphics heavy site where much of your content is presented in actual graphics. For example, I was trying to search for the Bush national guard documents recently... I eventually found them after many failed searches. It turns out that the documents were actual scans (graphics)... so the actual content of the documents was "hidden" from the search engines. Cloaker allows Webmasters to separately present the contents of graphics to the engines as actual text.
3. You have the seminal document discussing "Litoria caerulea". You realize, however, that few people will find this document, so you use Cloaker to present this document with the common name "white's tree frog" (which is more commonly searched for) to the spiders.
4. You realize that getting well-listed is increasingly like the lottery. The engines provide NO advice as to how to get well-listed other than to "design pages that are friendly to users". We have already seen that this is totally specious, as user-friendly pages are rarely well-indexed. Cloaker allows to you to play their game, presenting lots of slightly different pages to the engines to see which does well.
Some people say that cloaking bespoils the engines. Rather, I think it is the exact opposite: the engines bespoil the Internet. How? Since they are the kingmakers who decide who gets traffic, Webmasters MUST conform to their bizarre rules for getting indexed. Too often, this means that the top listed pages in the engines are totally user-unfriendly. Cloaker allows Webmasters to overcome this problem, separately targeting content to the search engines and actual human users.
Cloaker is a tool. And like a hammer or firearm or any other tool, it is used responsibly by the vast majority of our users. It's goal is not to deceive end-users with "page-jacked" content to get them to some porn site. We insist that our customers use our software ethically to overcome the shortcomings of the engines: to accurately promote their sites in the engines.
[per TOS, signature removed]
[ Message was edited by: thejenn 09/14/2004 11:39 am ]
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unreviewed
Joined: Dec 07, 2000
# Posts: 6776
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 01:00
Peter, would it be fair to say that your software writes pages that are absolutely for spiders and not for human viewing? I believe, and correctly me if I'm wrong, but your software takes a list of keywords and page titles and allows you to auto-generate as many pages as you like, thousands, and they are all interlinked. I realize your software has an add-on that will allow you to also write some complete paragraphs to intermingle with the mainly auto-generated words, however, the result compared to a real page meant for humans can't really be compared, would that be fair to say?
I'd be interested on your view of what is spam? Do you believe that the engines are fair game ...
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secloaker
Joined: Sep 08, 2004
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 01:48
The engines don't provide any actual, usable advice to get good listings other than "write for your users". As most Webmasters have also found, we've noted that bizarre factors often result in top listings. How else to explain why one page is ranked 150, and another page on the same domain WITH THE SAME KEYWORDS in slightly different order ranks in the top 10?
So, yes, Cloaker helps people "play the search engine lottery" by constructing pages on-the-fly for the engines. And, yes, these pages are interlinked to prompt the engines to keep exploring. Cloaker does not, however, present unlimited, thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of cloaked pages at any one time. And, unlike doorway pages that require users to see their bizarre spider-oriented content, we invisibly take the user to a user-friendly site.
Please do not make the mistake, also, of assuming that the search engines are beacons of fairness. Their sole product is other peoples' work. And, now, their top listings are exclusively the domain of pay-per-click entries. And even the non-PPC listings are often paid -- paid express inclusion, paid crawls, and so on are all increasingly required to get top listings.
Cloaker tries to bring the ball back into the small Webmaster's court a little -- it lets those Webmasters who cannot spend 1000s on "SEO" experts to rijigger their content to get in the engines to get a little traffic.
In regards to spam... spam is defined as "unsolicited commercial email". This term totally does not apply to search engine listings. Search engines ACTIVELY GO OUT AND REQUEST PAGES FROM WEB SERVERS. Is it the responsibility of the Web server to ensure that the content that lives on ITS servers meets the requirements of Google, et al. (who will subsequently use that content for their own commercial purposes)?
Email spam is active -- it is something that the receipient cannot do anything about. Search engine "spam" is, ultimately, the responsibility of the engines -- they are the ones that actively crawl servers for content, rank that content according to their own hidden rules, and present that content to users. By talking about "spam" in their indexes, they pass the buck and highlight the weaknesses in their own ability to rank content "accurately".
What is search engine spam? Pages that aren't what the engines want to appear first? If I search for "vietnam hotels" and the first 50 listings are commercial listings for Vietnam hotels... are these pages spam? If these pages employ techniques to get on top, does that make them spam? If "being on top" is simply a matter of repeating the words "vietnam hotel" many times, isn't it fair to assume that many Webmasters will do exactly this? Isn't it fair to assume that Webmasters will evolve their sites to rank well in the engines? Are they spamming?
What about those Webmasters who recognize that the top-ranked pages are increasingly Frankensteinien -- just lots of repeated words and phrases to take advantage of the crude way that engines index pages -- and decide to use our software, Search Engine Cloaker, to ensure that end-users see USER-oriented, USER-friendly content, rather than the detritus that otherwise occupies AND IS REQUIRED to get these top spots?
One new trick of "ethical" SEOs is to create "legitimate" doorway pages. Namely, these pages consist of content dynamically grabbed from RSS feeds coupled with Google Ads. These pages apparently pass muster as "non spam" pages, as they aren't actively removed. Are these pages spam? Are these "legitimate" pages better than cloaked pages that redirect users to actual functioning sites, rather than such bizarre miscegnations?
[Per TOS, signature removed]
[ Message was edited by: thejenn 09/14/2004 11:39 am ]
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unreviewed
Joined: Dec 07, 2000
# Posts: 6776
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 02:06
Well, can we agree that most engines are using off page factors to judge quality content ... and isn't it true that there just isn't a quick fix for that?
For example, if you take a 50 page product web site, regardless if you create 800 doorway pages by hand, or you use a cloaked auto-generator program such as your product ... what can't be done on those original 50 pages? My point being, are not both the handcrafted and the auto-generated pages a waste of time and effort, when it's the inbound links that make the biggest difference?
I'm sure we can both agree that a thousand page unlinked web site is worth its weight in tofu ...
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secloaker
Joined: Sep 08, 2004
# Posts: 19
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 02:12
That's exactly right. Cloaking is simply a supplement to an overall search engine strategy, including getting high-quality incoming links, generating good overall content, and so on. This also undermines the argument for those that say that cloaking is simply used by "spammers". Spammers who just use cloaking won't get very far, because they indeed need off-the-page factors.
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unreviewed
Joined: Dec 07, 2000
# Posts: 6776
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 02:25
Good answer.
I could press the argument that both cloaking and adding handcrafted doorway pages to a fifty page product web site is not necessary, because you can optimise the original 50 pages, and concentrate the benefit of your off page ranking into those fifty pages. However, lets move on to a fifty page flash web site.
If I did have such a flash web site and decided to cloak 50 handcrafted pages, and I mean each cloaked page must match up to a specific flash page, can your product do that as easily as some of your competitors products?
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Ron C
Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
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Posted: 2004-Sep-09 02:48
The engines don't provide any actual, usable advice to get good listings other than "write for your users".
Maybe the engines don't, Peter, but others (hint, hint) certainly do.
I honestly think your arguments are mostly based on a misunderstanding of SEO. For example, not requiring validation to a Member's Only area isn't really cloaking (and certainly shouldn't require a separate script) as long as the content spidered is the same as the content seen by Members. And a page on "Litoria caerulea" would hardly be seminal if it didn't mention "white's tree frog" fairly prominently. Virtually any situation that is not search engine friendly will also be either not user-friendly or have serious accessibility problems (those national guard documents someone scanned need to made available to their blind visitors,, too!). The only exception to that general rule, I think, centers on technical hurdles presented by poorly written or configured software. And even that often boils down to usability.
There isn't anything magical about SEO, and getting good rankings isn't comparable to winning the lottery. Unless you're in a competitive realm, it's mostly just common sense and avoiding some less than obvious pitfalls. And the proof of that, Peter, is already in the SERPs. As long as I and others can consistently rank not just well, but rank higher than your cloaked pages, there's little reason to face the inherent dangers of cloaking. Do it the right way and every "lottery ticket" can be a winner.
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