Hi all, Cloaking (showing search engines one thing and human visitors another*), is said to be highly penalized by search engines when it's detected. What characteristics of a site that is cloaking tell a search engine that something fishy is going on? And what types of drops in rankings can one expect? Not doing anything of the sort (yet ) but just beginning to understand how it works. Thanks! *feel free to correct my definition if it's off
SE would look for fingerprints on other sites and the reply to their querry. The result would be a ban from the SE if detected.
I think it's still being very heavily used by black hat SEO's and the detection rate is currently minimal from everything I've heard. Google is full of bluster because they know it's going on so the tell everyone they know it's going on and that they are banning every "cheater" that they catch. Personally I think that Google will gradually become less and less relavent as time goes on once everyone figures out that it's the black hatters who have all the pages in the top ten of most popular keyword categories. There's a better system out there than the one Google says we all MUST subscribe to--I just hope someone finds it soon!
Do the search engines actually find the cloaked sites? Or is it actually competitors within the niche that turn the websites in?
BJW, One would assume, in order to find a cloaked site they would have to surreptitiously visit from another IP, not their own, and send a different user agent, in order to avoid the cloak then compare with the page googlebot saw. They'd have to come from the same general geo-targeted area to avoid seeing too completely different pages for two completely different areas, but I don't see why it would be that difficult for them... I don't know, it seems like it would be fairly easy to detect cloaked sites, but maybe not? Maybe you could get away with changing some keywords here and there, since a lot of pages are dynamic and parts of them change anyway... I wouldn't risk it, but oh well. =)
I think relatively black hat SEOs are taking most of the market share in the tops of the SERPs. By employing a rather basic black hat SEO strategy and patience, it is fairly easy to rank up in the SEs. A lot of big companies are hiring black hats so they don't have to pay for 'sponsored links' Black hat is good because it allows people to make money on adsense, although it does give a lot of irrelevant results for many different keyword searches.
I think the best way for a search engine to detect Cloaking is to compare the cache from a known spider to the cache from an unknown spider. Known and and unknown cache relative to the cloaker. Cloaking or any other unethical search engine optimization process would get your site banned in the search engines sooner or later.