my weekly searchengine secret revealed v.4
 

... to cloak or not to cloak. (to hide or not to hide your optimized pages)

from 1996-2000 cloaking was king, and there were many good services out there to supply you with a good SE spider IPs list, but it was still easy to snatch some of your competitors doorway templates through various translating services (such as altavista´s babelfish) as they spidered the site to be translated withing the same IP C-class .... many people forgot about that.

after seeing many good SEs to drop out (infoseek/excite/eurseek/voila - av and fast to follow), it´s basicly all down to 2 ... google and inktomi based engines.


cloaking with google/inktomi:
in my opinion it is almost unnecessary to cloak pages at google. google values your sites pagerank much higher than the html of your site, therefore a competitor using your sites html as a template will have little if not any advantage of doing that, but some people still prefer to have their optimized sites cloaked at google.
so how to do it without getting penaltylized? fist of all you will have to disallow google to cache your site, this is done by <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/us/webmasters/3.html#B2">metagtags </a>. once this has been done you can either work with .htaccess to redirect the spider to your doorway pages or do the IP based settings with your servers redirect settings. more info <a href="http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/cloaking.htm">here</a>.

unlike 2 years ago searchengines care about their database today, so if you cloak you can get penaltilized and your domain can end up on the blacklist. from my expirience cloaking with google will get you into trouble sooner or later, but cloaking with inktomi is pretty much save.

if you don´t realy care about your optimized sites and you just want to make sure that the surfer gets to your mainpage fast, best thing to do is a simple j.a.v.a.s.c.r.i.p. refresh. this way your site is "kinda" hidden too. (well, not pretty good though). if you decide to use a j.a.v.a.s.c.r.i.p. refresh, make sure that you don´t put the refresh location directly into the script, better put in the script´s location and point it to your .js file (SCRIPT LANGUAGE="J.a.v.a.S.c.r.i.p.t." SRC="/youscript.js")

Content!
Content!
Content!

And...forget the rest....

Thanks Funkmaster your search engine tips are very helpful.

:)

funkmaster i have some mainstream ideas but i'm not good w/ marketing. i'll build it and you market.

very insightful indeed thanks.

Google does want you to cloak your data, but only certian data. Here is an example

Load up the following url
http://www.dvdera.com/newdvds.phtml?action=listall into your browser. Move the mouse over any of the DVD's and take note of the actual URL addresses.

Then visit this url http://www.dvdera.com/newdvds.phtml?...ll&google=true and move the mouse over the DVD links... You see the difference?

Google actually likes this type of cloaking, if you were cloaking one thing and showing something completely different to the surfer then you would get bitchslaped by them.

If you do cloak or play the SE games just remember not to draw too much attention to yourself.