To Cloak or not to Cloak

[Noise-Barrier]

okay...newbie question...

can someone explain what exactly "cloaking" is?

[cvos]

One of the only reasons to consider website cloaking is to protect yourself from blanket snooping from the government.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/27/1947207

[florabalance]

Cloaking as I understand it is to display one version of your web site to the typical visitor/consumer, another version to the search engine spyders. The last I saw the strategy was to rely on known ip addresses of SE spyders to distinguish the two.

What prevents google from using random ip addresses to gather some data from your site and compare the results with what their spyder sees? Personally I think the Search Engines definitely view cloaking as "black hat".

[craigmn3]

The rules are changing boys and girls and I think we've forgotten the FIRST rule of SEO, that is...what works for another can work for you. We've gotten so into keyword density, link farming, black hat, white hat, et al and we've lost track of what really does the job......Copying some one elses technique

Or at least I have

I have several sites (one that just today reached number 1 on google for my major keyword...been hanging out at 2 for a long time pat pat pat) and I have been running these sites and pages through filter and tool and sniffer and I have not been happy with the results.

The last week I put the tools away and began looking at my competition.....examining them, what it was that made them higher than me. I got official and laid out a spreadsheet with 20 or so parameters and for Google and Yahoo the answers (each one slightly different) became clear. I ripped off....er copied um ...emulated my competion and what worked for them, and all my sites are all in the top 20 now.

So the guys with no meta tags and horrible design (in tradtional seo fashion) now make sense to me why they are (were) ahead of me.

I think it's a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, being way too focused on chasing the squirrel of SEO and forgetting the basics.

When it doesn't make sense why Joe Schmoe who can't write code to save his life is in front of you....find out why!

To paraprhase Sherlock Holmes - When confronted with a situation where you have exhausted every possible scenario as to why your website is not ranking, then the impossible must be the solution

[edhan]

Never cloak your site as you will ended up banned by search engines. Think of building quality content for long term business.

[bijunair]

Can someone help me to know how to do cloaking practically??

Will be grateful.

[Peter (IMC)]

Hi All,


My first port of call was to see what everyone else is doing and so I typed in the most competitve keyword 'jobs' into Google.

Site number 1 is the guardian jobs http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/.

So I take a look to see what they are doing.

The answer (on the surface) seems to be 'not much'.

There are 75 inbound links (most with no keyword anchor text).

There are no meta-tags, no heading tags and many of the images don't have alt tags.

Why are they ranking so highly?

L

A simple answer is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

and they have a PR8.

Not that the PR it self is the key here. But it indicates it's a popular site. Links do the trick here... On-page and on-site optimization is only part of SEO. When a site is extremely popular, the links are the power behind the rankings.

[sem4u]

Peter is right. The Guardian is a long established site (and newspaper) which has a high trust value in the eyes of Google. I expect if they added another section on a different topic it would rank well...think Amazon...

[webpresence]

Hi Lady P,

I've ran a couple of link reports for the Guardian site and I'm pretty sure that the high number of quality links is the reason for their #1 position. Other factors contributing to their success include;

> The 'trust' that Google has for the Guardian site
> The shear size of the site
> It's 'resource' nature
> It's age
> It's usability (i.e. high numbers of new and returning visitors, 'add to favourites' figures etc.)


For this reason I'd recommend having your SEO strategy focus on 'niche' keyphrases (competing directly with Guardian would have you pulling you hair out!).

As for cloaking, forget about it, is it really worth compromising your relationship with Google?

Also Lady P, you wrote "ran some tests on another link checker recommended by someone" - would you be able to provide the location of this tool. We use a few different tools but would be interesting to see what others are using.

Many thanks, hope that’s helped!

[jtracking]

...and we've lost track of what really does the job......Copying some one elses technique...

Yep that and pure honest seo works for me. As Anthony Robin called it, emulation. If you emulate success you will be successful...

Now it doesn't work just by simple copying but with a few tweaks here and there emulating a successful site will being you some happy results.