63 replies to this topic

[Guzman]

I am responsible for SEO on our company e-commerce site and senior management have given me a sizeable budget to specifically implement a Cloaking campaign as we have recently been badly affected by the "jagger" update.

I am researching the best Cloaking service provider and so far have only found www.fantomaster-services.com who seem to offer such a service.

Has anyone ever heard of Fantomaster?
Do they have good reputation? Any comments would be appreciated.

[nuthin]

does your management not desire nor care about long term sustainable results for there business / website / domain ?

does it also not care about the potential embarrassment to the brand of there business ?

hopefully you have a throw-away domain name to play with & it's not the be-all-end-all to your companies business & marketing/branding online or.. whats that saying, your eventually going to "be up **** creek without a paddle" :cry:

i would seek and get some alternative advice before implentation of your managements plans.

[Adrian]

If you're going to do cloaking, the fantomaster way is probably as good as any

Very knowledgable, pretty well known. I met Ralph briefly last year and I know some of the other forum members/mods know him/them a lot better.

Cloaking is the kind of thing you want to do a lot of research on before implimenting I'd suggest, it's the kind of thing you can get penalties for if caught.

[nuthin]

theres always an alternative to cloaking.
if this is the last resort for this particular company, kill me now plz?
so you got "hit" boo, hoo.
go back and see why you got hit, don't take even more drastic measures which will send you deeper into the black hole.
but hey, if your only after short term results and don't care about the domain, i'm all for it! good luck

[kensplace]

Cloaking is a difficult topic,

There are different types of cloaking, there are the often used examples of delivering targeted ads according to the visitors country (from there i.p address) or altering the content according to which country the visitor is from.

Then there is "nasty" (in my opinion) cloaking, for example, I could

Cloak so pages always load "fast" if alexa visits to get a better loading time shown on alexa.

Change title and h1 etc tags if a bot visits.

Both are "nasty" as they are NOT what a real life visitor would get if they visit the site, they are faking what the site is, or how it performs.
In effect they are cheating to get a higher search engine ranking, which is unfair on other sites that dont cheat.

Search engines base part of the rank algo on what the visitor would see, if you fake that, and optimise it for bots, then they are seeing something other than what the visitor would see, so you are lying to them.

Thats risky, and easy to spot, just takes a competitor, or a manual check at a search engine company, or even a bot under a fake referrer name to notice that the spider results differ from the natural webpage.

Sure google and the like "cloak" by showing country specific pages when people visit, but thats not really cloaking as such, its just delivery a different page to the user depending on there location.

If the user was a search engine, or a real visitor, they would BOTH get the same results from spidering or using a browser - unlike dodgy cloaking which would give the bot a fake page to read.

Delivering better content by "cloaking" is fine, and a good thing to do, as long as the content you deliver is the same for users as well as bots.
But once you start to spit out pages "just for googlebot" etc which are different from what a human would see, then thats trying to cheat the system, imagine the chaos if all sites did that.
I noticed on the othe site that it mentions "it is highly unlikely that you will get penalized or banned with more than one search engine at a time" when talking about possible bans if caught - I disagree with that, after all if a competitor took the trouble to spot a site cloaking, do you really think they would only report it to one search engine.... Nope they would probably report it to every one they could find.

[nuthin]

theres the lag effect.
a cloaked site on Google depending on the type of cloaking utilized is likely going to removed quicker than that of Yahoo! &/or MSN.
i would be more concerned and worried about the "management" not caring about there company brand &/or long term sustainable results.
tells me there looking for a quick buck & if this is anything to go by, would you want to work for such a company with no long term aspirations in regards to there online advertising? not me.

[Ron Carnell]

There are multiple potential reasons to cloak, but when the primary one is to rank in the engines better, I think there's one question that first has to be answered.

"What are you going to put on the cloaked page that you can't put on the uncloaked page?"

Being unable to rank a page well is a problem that will never be solved simply by cloaking the page.

[mcs]

I am responsible for SEO on our company e-commerce site and senior management have given me a sizeable budget to specifically implement a Cloaking campaign as we have recently been badly affected by the "jagger" update.

Blimey, is it April 1st already?

Nice try Guzman, nearly got me there

If it isn't April 1st, your company might need the servcies of a psychiatrist - assuming that it's a successful company which desires a future?

If I were in your shoes I'd take them for a walk to the nearest employment agency...

A budget for cloaking? That's fantastic

[DamnedIfIdont]

Ohhh so so many self proclaimed experts!!

OK, hands up everyone that has ever commissioned or constructed one single Cloaking campaign in the past five years!

Ho hum, thought so!

[Ron Carnell]

Waving hand ...

And I can practically guarantee you, I won't be the only one here.

[DamnedIfIdont]

Considering the statements you made......

"What are you going to put on the cloaked page that you can't put on the uncloaked page?"

Being unable to rank a page well is a problem that will never be solved simply by cloaking the page.

.....It just seems to me that there is a total misunderstanding as to the very basics of a cloaking structure. I aplogize if this sounds rude, as it is not meant to be. However, its very annoying to read so much misinformation on forums clearly from persons who do not have the slightest concept as to how cloaking is meant to work, let alone what can or cannot be handed out by the search engines in the way of panalties if caught. If one was to take for real the hype out there, we should be able to find a web site that would list thousands of banned core sites for cloaking. I challenge anyone to name but five!!

[Wit]

Why not "educate" people then (instead of rant)?

Thanks in advance m8...

[Jammer]

If one was to take for real the hype out there, we should be able to find a web site that would list thousands of banned core sites for cloaking. I challenge anyone to name but five!!

I tried to Google for this list but it was banned from the index, "linking to bad neighbourhoods"... Whatever that means

Now seriously, if you can't make your initial page work for you in Google then you shouldn't even be putting pages on the web. You guys are the ones that make my job sound bad...

[Respree]

Welcome to Cre8asite DamnedIfIdont.

I don't know too much about the subject of cloaking, but would love to learn more.

I think many who are uneducating on the subject may infer a negative connotation, just as one might automatically infer a knife is 'bad' because could be used to kill people. On the other hand, it could be used to prepare a sumptuous meal.

Love to an objective discussion on the subject.

[Ron Carnell]

Considering the statements you made......

In my rush to raise my hand, I guess I neglected to welcome you to the forums, DamnedIfIdont, so let me get that little pleasantry out of the way first.

Welcome.

Now, I think what my statement implied was that if you take a page that fails to rank well and cloak it, it will STILL fail to rank well. And I stand by that statement entirely. Cloaking has absolutely nothing to do with optimizing a page.

There are, I think, a lot of people who think cloaking is a panacea. They think, because their visitors can't see the web page, they can get away with throwing a whole bunch of keyword-gibberish on a page and automatically get a good ranking. Sorry, but I honestly don't believe it works that way, except perhaps in fields with little or no competition (in which case, cloaking is a silly risk any way).

Unless you already have a pretty fair idea what it takes to rank a page well, cloaking isn't going to help you. If you DO have a fair idea what it takes, chances are you don't really need to cloak. You "probably" just need a really competent copywriter. In either case, however, the answer isn't going to surface unless the question is first asked.

[DamnedIfIdont]

Thank you for the welcome greetings.......

Cloaking has absolutely nothing to do with the core pages of your web site. There is no direct tie whatsoever. A cloaking campaign is run independently using KWs and content relevant to the business of the core site. The only tie between the two is that the highly optimized pages of the cloaking campaign are re-directed to the core site.

You core site continues to be SEO'd as normal. You dont substitute one for the other and cloaking has nothing to do with getting your core site ranked. The only objective of a cloaking campaign is to drive extra qualified traffic to your core site.

I just cannot understand the chat about someone cloaking becuase the are too lazy to properly SEO a core site. That's not what cloaking is about.

[bwelford]

Hi DamnedIfIdont. Welcome to the Forums, :wave:

I'm certainly not an expert in these matters, but what you described in your last post sound like doorway pages rather than cloaking. In other words, you would create a whole group of other pages, each one optimized for a particular search engine and with an automatic redirect to the core website. Is that what you're talking about or is there another way of arranging this type of functionality?

[DamnedIfIdont]

No, its cloaking....well, actually the better term is IP Delivery (otherwise known as cloaking). Nothing to do with doorway pages.

[Jammer]

Nah, sounds like you're off a bit now. What you described are doorway pages and/or landingpages whatever you call them.

Cloaking is based on IP, useragent or whatever data you can substract from the http headers. It delivers different content to different users. In the case of cloaking you edit your normal pages to deliver a different content (or even a different site) to different visitors

[Ron Carnell]

Cloaking has absolutely nothing to do with the core pages of your web site. There is no direct tie whatsoever.

Just for the sake of clarity, Damned (I hope you don't mind if I'm informal -- feel free to call me Ron in return), are you saying that the cloaked page and the destination page don't share the same URL? "No direct tie whatsoever" sounds like you're suggesting they don't even sit on the same domain? I know I must be confused, because that rather old bait-and-switch tactic doesn't even require cloaking.