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Risk Factors
Myths and rumors abound on the
being banned for cloaking issue, and five experts will
probably give you six opinions …
Well, here is ours: DON'T PANIC and don't be fooled by the hype!
Can your core web site get banned by the search engines for cloaking? If
that was true, then your competitor could build some cloaked domains and
point them to your web site so that it would be banned! Think of the damage
that would be done if that was at all true. Not a very likely scenario, is
it?
So can cloaking get your cloaked domains banned from the search engines' indices?
The straight answer to that one is: Yes – but …!
If you are working in a very competitive industry (e.g. adult
web sites, real estate, and others), chances are you won't ever rank in any
major SE's Top10 league unless you are using state of the art stealth technology.
This is not to say cloaking isn't without its risks. While hysteria is never
the best of advisors, trivializing the matter and ignoring the real stakes involved
will obviously do you no good either. One would have thought that the final
answer should rest with the search engines: after all, it's their own turf.
Unfortunately, their public statements and declarations are, contrary to what
one might expect, no great help. Quite the contrary in fact: most SE officials
will tell you that they regard cloaking (ANY form of cloaking, mind you!) as
"spam". Some spin masters will even claim that they are actively eliminating
it. In a few cases they will attempt to create some mystique around what they
are doing (“Very effective technology to counter cloaking in our possession
… not authorized to tell you more … blah blah.”) However,
even supposing it's true, it certainly doesn't show in their search results!
So can you really have your cloaked domains banned for cloaking? Categorically yes
– if, for example, your competitors have snitched on you to the search
engines, and if the search engines' staff have manually checked and compared
your spider fodder with what you are actually serving your human visitors. It
can happen, too, if you overdo your submissions or if there are significant
changes in your historical submission patterns. E.g. if your site used to submit
say 3-5 pages a month over a certain period of time, only to start submitting
hundreds of pages per week all of a sudden, you may indeed be inviting trouble:
in a worst case scenario a human editor may come along to check the matter out.
On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that you will get penalized or
banned with more than one search engine at a time. Bad enough as this may
be, we would always recur to setting up new Shadow
Domains to replace banned domains in this unlikely scenario. No big loss at
all! If a cloaking campaign is is implemented professionally
and with minimal errors and sound marketing techniques, your chances of being
banned are truly minimal.
Note that we do NOT condone cloaking for misleading purposes:
it is counter productive and will only serve to make life more difficult for
all parties concerned. If a user tries to search for relevant information links
and your site floods the results pages #1 through #40, chances are you won't
need any hard hitting competitors to get reported!
Finally, to disperse all doubts in this matter: while cloaking
is a highly efficient and effective technique, it will do you little good if
you don't have the content to match. After all, surfers will always be free
to vote with their feet (well, mice, really …), and if you are trying
to insult their intelligence by subterfuge, don't pretend to surprise if they
resort to returning the favor with a vengeance."
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