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Is Cloaking
Ethical?
Let's put it this way. Search engines do it all the time! For instance, Google
delivers different pages according to where in the world the surfer is located.
People in the UK receive AdWord advertisements that are relative to the UK, and
people in the U.S. receive AdWords that are relative to the U.S. Google delivers
different pages according to the surfer's IP address. That's IP delivery,
and that's cloaking!
Also, from time to time, search engines prevent certain people from gaining
access to their .com versions. Instead, by checking the surfers' IP addresses,
they redirect people to their localized versions - even when the surfers really
do want to go to the .com version! Again, that's IP delivery, and that's
cloaking.
Because the search engines do it, it is clear that cloaking isn't intrinsically
unethical or wrong. If it's ok for the search engines to do it, then it must be
ok for everyone else to do it. So what is it about cloaking that some people are
dead against?
There is no sensible answer to that. The general idea is that serving people one
page and serving the search engines a different page is simply wrong because the
engines are ranking the page according to what they believe it to be and not
according to what it actually is. That idea is purely a matter of principle, and
has nothing at all to do with common sense.
The common sense view is that, if a page is ranked correctly, according to its
topic, then surfers will find it in the search results, click on it and go to
exactly where they expect to go to from reading the listing in the search
results. It doesn't matter how the page came to be ranked in that position, and
it doesn't matter if another page took its place when the engine was evaluating
it. As long as it is ranked correctly, according to its topic, surfers are
perfectly happy.
The fact that cloaking can be used to send people to sites and topics that they
did not expect to go to when clicking on a listing in the search results, is an
excellent reason to be against the misuse of cloaking, but it is no reason at
all to be against the cloaking technique in general.
More than likely, however, engines will look to page content before deciding
if you are using cloaking as spam. For example, if you optimize a page for
Florida Key's Scuba Diving, and the search engine link pulls up a site
listing the primary dive destinations in the Florida Keys, you are probably
okay. However, if you click on the same link, and the site turns out to be
for a travel agency, the line between quality submission and spam becomes
blurred. If the same link takes you to a XXX site the line becomes clear.
It's spam.
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