Is cloaking is on the rise?
First, let me make clear that we are 100% opposed to cloaking and do not choose to engage in cloaking. Second, let me define what cloaking is. Cloaking is where you write your web page's code in such a way that it displays one way to a search engine and another way to everyone else. People who engage in cloaking do so because they want to create a highly optimized page that search engines will love and score highly but which will not present information to users in a way the web site's owner prefers. Over the years, search engines have been very successful in rooting out and penalizing sites that engage in cloaking. Finally, let me emphasize that Dan Thies and Leslie Rhode of SEO Braintrust are also opposed to cloaking.
However, there is reason for concern that cloaking may be making a comeback. Just yesterday I sat in on a conference call with Thies and Rhode, in which they suggested that cloaking will increase in search results within the next few years. In fact, Thies expressed his alarm and frustration that cloaking already dominates Adwords advertising. I had not been following Adwords very closely of late,so this was news to me. Adwords, of course, is Google's own primary advertising product that ties ads into search result listings at the top and on the left-hand side of those listings.
Cloaking is hard to spot and requires special tools to detect, except in cases where the person doing the cloaking does a sloppy job. Since I have not been paying attention to cloaking attempts in recent years, this pronouncement caught me by surprise. However, what Rhode said next was even more alarming. He said that with the renewed emphasis on on-page rankings by Google, Bing, etc. this past year and going forward, there is going to be more and more incentive for cloakers to do their dirty work, and that we will likely see cloaking start to dominate the organic (not paid) search results as well as the paid (Adwords) results. This is particularly alarming because it means that the search engine playing field is becoming even more uneven than it has been.
We at Connweb will start paying closer attention to this issue in the days and weeks ahead, and as always we will keep our eyes open for what it will take to react to the trend without engaging in such black hat activities ourselves.
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