Cloaking... Good, Bad, Ugly?

[ASpaventa]

Cloaking: The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.

We have an SEO firm championing this as a method through which they'll increase our results. It's an aggressive tactic, and dangerous too. How worried should we be with this method?

[_detz_]

Very..Google is getting pretty good at finding fraud...once you're out of their index it's VERY hard to get back in.

[Sporkman]

Google & BMW tangled re this a while back:

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/07/google/

[RayGoneFishing]

Originally Posted by ASpaventa

We have an SEO firm championing this as a method through which they'll increase our results. It's an aggressive tactic, and dangerous too. How worried should we be with this method?

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If your business depends on your website and you are in it for the long term, I'd stay away from cloaking. On the other hand, if you have plenty of websites and want to push one of them to the top, no matter what, and capitalize on the traffic while it lasts, cloaking might just get you the results you want. Just be aware that you'll get caught and banned eventually, and that website will become useless, so you'll have to start over again with a different domain.

[ASpaventa]

So if they're optimizing our main site which we use and plan on using hereon out for everything, cloaking is probably something we'd want to stay away from...

?

[RayGoneFishing]

Originally Posted by ASpaventa

So if they're optimizing our main site which we use and plan on using hereon out for everything, cloaking is probably something we'd want to stay away from...

?

For the main website of a business I would definitely advise against cloaking, or any other black or dark gray optimization techniques.

As a general rule, the more important the website is, the more white-hat the optimization should be. If you use techniques the search engines frown upon, they will eventually penalize your site or ban it outright. That may not be much of a problem if your website has a lot of other, non-SE traffic, but I've seen businesses go belly up because their websites lost most of their traffic after disappearing from the search engines.

So you need to think carefully what would happen if your website got banned by the search engines. If that would have a major impact on your business, don't do anything that could get you banned or penalized. Cloaking is definitely something that can get you banned, and most likely will get you banned sooner or later.

[PressureProsInc]

Fraud is never a good practice in business. Have integrity and do things the right way and the rewards are long term and plentiful.

[RayGoneFishing]

Originally Posted by PressureProsInc

Fraud is never a good practice in business.

That's no doubt true, but what does fraud have to do with cloaking?

[pete]

There's cloaking and then there is cloaking.

I'm referring not to pages, but to affiliate links. Many feel that cloaking affiliate links, so that the affiliate code does not show is a wise move.

Unfortunately, there are some out there who will always avoid an obvious affiliate link, even though they end up paying the exact same price. They'd rather let the actual seller make more than they would allow the person who introduced them to the product or servie to make a commission on the sale.

[PressureProsInc]

Originally Posted by RayGoneFishing

That's no doubt true, but what does fraud have to do with cloaking?

Based upon Google's course of action if you are caught utilizing this technique it is obviously viewed as an attempt at fraudulating (and or bypassing) the natural order of getting ranked by a search engine. I will say that the term is way open for debate because if one thinks about it, practicing many forms of SEO (creating your own backlinks for example) is doing the same thing.