Filed under: Ask SEM Inc
This question is brought to you by DP forum member Aks:
Hi every oneis it cloaking good or bad, can I be banned from search engines for it?
I run across this question quite a bit. Its a trickier question then most, because there are a view variables you need to look at. If you want to go with the Google gods and follow strict procedure, then the answer would be “It’s bad”. But this type of question really need to have the “With this site - MySite.com - is cloaking bad?”.
Before we get into a semi-answer, let’s discuss what cloaking is. Cloaking is showing a normal web visitor one page and a search engine crawler another. The purpose of this is to show more qualified, optimized pages for the search engine crawlers, with the benefit of better rankings…potentially.
There are a couple ways of doing cloaking, either with javascript redirects or IP-based. IP-based is the best and least traceable by the search engines. How IP-based cloaking works is you have a list of all the crawler IPs and when a crawler hits your cloaked page, you show them the search engine friendly page. When any other IP hits the page, you show them the web visitor page.
Now to semi-answer the question. I’m going to give you a view examples of what I would qualify as “ok” cloaking. I was doing consulting for a real estate web design company. They provided templated web sites with a very robust backend for the agents to make changes their sites.
The Problem: There was a feature in the backend to having a potential buyer land on an email capture form before moving forward to the listings and other areas within the site. We wanted a way for the search engines to still crawl those pages, but not allow visitors to access them without signing up first.
The Solution: We used IP-based cloaking to show the search engine crawlers the listing pages, as well as informational pages within the site and when a web visitor landed on those pages from the search engines, they were still given the email capture form. We were able to get those pages indexed and ranked that were stuck behind the email capture form, where the crawlers couldn’t crawl threw.
In the scenario above, I believe it was OK to use cloaking. Google got more informative information from the agent’s website by indexing a ton more pages and the agent was still able to capture the visitors email to follow up with. Win-Win.
Other big companies do this, especially newspaper websites. They’ll let their content become indexed, but when you land on it from the search engines, you have to sign up to get full access. Now, I know that sucks to have to register, but if you’re in the shoes of a business owner, its a great way to build your business and have people register and pay.
The Future: I think eventually Google and others will have to let up the “White Hat” NO CLOAKING what-so-ever mantra. I do believe its a case by case basis, but not every person that uses cloaking is trying to make money from Adsense or affiliate programs. 
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>