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05-09-2007, 09:25 PM
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SEO Junior
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: USA
Posts: 12
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Cloaking good or bad?
Hi every one is it cloaking good or bad, can I be banned from search engines for it?
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05-09-2007, 09:44 PM
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SEO
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: India, Delhi
Posts: 334
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it is depends how you use it, most of the time is has bad effect,
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05-09-2007, 10:31 PM
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SEO
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: New Delhi
Posts: 153
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Bad things are always bad it not matter what way it use.
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05-09-2007, 11:35 PM
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SEO
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: India, Delhi
Posts: 334
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 Agree,
but we can cloaking for different purposes, not only for SEO, so its not bad all the time, basically cloaking is a part of web development, not of SEO |
05-10-2007, 01:38 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 178
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by seopool
Agree,
but we can cloaking for different purposes, not only for SEO, so its not bad all the time, basically cloaking is a part of web development, not of SEO |
How it is useful and for what purpose? |
05-10-2007, 04:44 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: India, Delhi
Posts: 334
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if you develop A web based application for multi users, and offer different interfaces to ever user you can use cloaking, (This is just an example, you can use cloaking in many different ways as per your requirement)
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05-10-2007, 06:52 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 597
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by seopool
if you develop A web based application for multi users, and offer different interfaces to ever user you can use cloaking, (This is just an example, you can use cloaking in many different ways as per your requirement)
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I think hes got a point... it only became bad if someone use it in a bad way.. |
05-10-2007, 07:56 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: England, UK
Posts: 621
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Hmmm...well...I see where you're coming from seopool. But if your deploying cloaking techniques to achieve "themes", then your going about it the wrong way and likely to get penalised, banned, or devalued in some way.
That said, I do understand where you're coming from. However, when people talk about cloaking, it's fair to say they are talking about presenting different content to the search engines than to regular users. Theming is a different concept altogether, but always starts with a default user who'll see things exactly as the search engine spider would. Therefore, it's not cloaking. As I said though, inexperienced developers might use cloaking techniques to achieve themes, but thats a mistake.
Google state quite clearly that under no circumstances should you deploy any form of cloaking. By this they mean that their spider, googlebot, should be presented with exactly the same content as users, at least a default anonymous user.
Some webmasters have wrongly intrepreted some of the webmaster guidelines to mean that you should use cloaking in some situations (such as if your site uses session id's in the URL's) to mean that you should use cloaking in order to help googlebot spider your site. Again, it's not true. You will be penalised for any cloaking that causes the spider to see different content/pages than a default user - no matter what your intentions.
So, cloaking (having different content for users than for SE spiders) is always a bad thing - without exception.
Themes are completely fine, and there should be no reason to deploy cloaking techniques in order to enable theming support.
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05-10-2007, 08:46 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: India, Delhi
Posts: 334
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by BSolveIT
Hmmm...well...I see where you're coming from seopool. But if your deploying cloaking techniques to achieve "themes", then your going about it the wrong way and likely to get penalised, banned, or devalued in some way.
That said, I do understand where you're coming from. However, when people talk about cloaking, it's fair to say they are talking about presenting different content to the search engines than to regular users. Theming is a different concept altogether, but always starts with a default user who'll see things exactly as the search engine spider would. Therefore, it's not cloaking. As I said though, inexperienced developers might use cloaking techniques to achieve themes, but thats a mistake.
Google state quite clearly that under no circumstances should you deploy any form of cloaking. By this they mean that their spider, googlebot, should be presented with exactly the same content as users, at least a default anonymous user.
Some webmasters have wrongly intrepreted some of the webmaster guidelines to mean that you should use cloaking in some situations (such as if your site uses session id's in the URL's) to mean that you should use cloaking in order to help googlebot spider your site. Again, it's not true. You will be penalised for any cloaking that causes the spider to see different content/pages than a default user - no matter what your intentions.
So, cloaking (having different content for users than for SE spiders) is always a bad thing - without exception.
Themes are completely fine, and there should be no reason to deploy cloaking techniques in order to enable theming support.
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Nice Ideas, But again You are thinking as a SEO, not as a user,
but don't forget we are doing SEO for Users not for search engines,
Search Engines are just a way to reach the right visitors |
05-10-2007, 09:14 AM
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SEO
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: England, UK
Posts: 621
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Actually, I was thinking/talking as a developer.
As a developer, we create sites for users, ...and as a website owner (or as an SEO) we want that site to do well on the search engines. Thats true, of course. 
If considering users when developing a site, to the point of catering for themes and customisation - it still requires a default/anonymous user. This user has all the default settings before anything gets customised. The view of the site that a spider see's will be the same as this anonymous user. If thats not the case......it should be.
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