Thanks

To see if others are cloaking compare the title that show up in search results to what you find at the actual site. Compare the description if the SE shows the meta description, else look for the phrases that you'll see come up in google. Also, compare the cached page to the real page.

Question on the cached page: I've had an SEO guy tell me it's possible to fool google's cached pages. I can't see how this could be done at ALL though. This is coming from a guy that does SEO for online cinema. no small potatos here.

For search engines. These can be anything from humans going out and looking at the real page and comparing it to what their search engine found to setting up a whole different spider that goes out *looking like a normal browser* and snooping around the sites its true spider found. If we can submit to SE's with software that makes itself look like a regular browser and software that passes through a proxy server with a pool of IP's the SE's can do the same to come back and check us out.

For #3.... i dunno. I'm sure the site that created the pages in the first place would have proof and could sue your ass for doing such a dumb thing... not saying that you're planning on doing it :P dont think that just jacking someone else's code is going to make you a millionare though. your domain is not theirs, therefor you have no links coming to you.... hmm... speaking of which... that itself is proof of who the real site is.... dont do it. bad bad idea.

ok, now what's everyone else's 2 cents on this???

how close should your cloaked page be to your real page before you start risking it?

question: the answers i posted above to see if someone is cloaking... is that as good as it gets?

is cloaking really that necissary?? i'm competing in an area where it looks like no one is cloaking. the only benefit i can see to cloaking is being able to tweek pages for each SE.

If no one is cloaking in your competitive sphere, I would say the downside probably far outweighs the upside. (And I don't have an anti-cloaking attitude in general.)

Are you open to dialogue through email? Actually here is just as good and would benenfit others. Rephrased: I have more questions on cloaking and would hope that you might be able to shed some light on my questions.

1) I have a few sources that say ip-delivery is the best. Your opinion?

2) Is cloaking on its way out? I just read that at the last SE confrence a google rep spoke and was very clear on telling everyone not to cloak. (That was after my post this morning

3) It seems to me it would be *very* easy for these companies to detect cloaking.

4) The same source that mentioned google at the SE conference (se-secrets.com) mentioned that people have already been busted by google and that google warned they'll be going full force on cracking down on violators in 6-9 months (from the time of the conference)

5) specificly what areas are you in? I'm about to release in the auto parts area and i've seen that no one shows signs of cloaking there and it does not seem to be too competitive. A hundred or two inbound links and i'm sitting pretty.

A new client recently asked me about implementing cloaking.

I told him that Google has engineers that are way smarter than he and I put together.

I asked him if his last consultant used cloaking. "Uh, yeah."

A quick Google link check showed that the majority of his sites had the death knell of "Sorry, no information is available for URL..."

You are correct about the description the SE got vs. what you get as an inicator of cloaking.

We used IP delivery for a while, and it worked, but I was always fearful of getting busted, and now the SEs are getting better at catching cloakers, so I would say it is definitely on the way out and may not be worth the time investment to figure it out, just to get busted.

If you are going to try it USE A DIFFERENT DOMAIN, you are taking a risk, and do not want to get your site or a clients site banned from a SE.

They cloaked in such a way that the typical "check the title" and 'check the description detection' didn't apply. They would match those and then use the body text to achieve the higher rankings. Granted this called for an enormous amount of pages but it is also was rather undetectable and allowed them to shake of their competition.

Their cloaking was IP based and all server side. Obviously I was never privy to the specifics but I do not think it was PERL or CGI based.

I attended the search engine watch convention is Boston and cloaking was brought up. The rep from Google was the only one willing to speak on the subject and what he said in a nut shell is that they weren't against cloaking perse. What they didn't like was spamming and cloaking to show up for irrelevant terms i.e. a porno site showing up for 'online shopping'.

With all the merging and converging of engines lately the amount of actual real estate is dwindling. Whether or not cloaking is ethical depends on the cloaker. In the scenario I witnessed it was a necessary evil (if you will). Their sites were relevant for the keywords and phrases that they appeared for and their competition was prevented from high jacking their pages.

What everyone think about XML programs that would be offered by Inktomi and other SEs?

I did read something about them and they appear to be a solution for a portion of the problem of cloaking. If I understood well (my English is poor) such programs show to the SEs one thing and to the user something alse.

I will appreciate any information on the subject.