hi what do you think about "Cloaking"? I mean do you use it for your sites? and what about "IP delivery." Is there anyway that search engines find it and thereby ban the site on their own? Please explain. Thank You.
Depends. Cloaking has gotten a bad reputation for its many forms of abuse. However there are cases that you could argue cloaking makes a lot of sense: Flash Content for User -> Written Content for Engines Subscription content for user -> free access for engines Most homebrew solutions will be caught by the engines, but the question is if they care if you don't go over board (show Adsense to users and related links to engines ....) In a way, geotargetting is a form of cloaking too. Same goes for multiple language navigation menus. There is nothing wrong in showing a french menu to french guys and the engines probably won't mind. Same goes for Duplicate content. You might want to have printer friendly pages and other things and although you could hide them via robots.txt, you can also cloak them (the engines always see only one page) SE won't care if you cloak just a small part of a page (e.g. some ads). If you are cloaking on a large scale (showing users duplicate content and rewrite it for the SE to avoid duplicate content) you probably need to invest a lot in professional IP databases (fantomaster). I highly recommend to stay away from this. I never tried it. I'd rather spend the time and money to build and acquire good content. Do I use cloaking? No. I have done it on an experimental site once and never got caught, but I never really had any plans for the site either (just playing around).
Quality guidelines - basic principles Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." If they catch you be sure they'll ban you.
As I suspected. Someone asks about cloaking and immediately a big outcry follows. Please read the examples I gave again. In the end, certain cloaking techniques can be very beneficial for the user (e.g. language targetting). Cloaking is not per se against any (arbitrary) webmaster guidelines, if you have a purpose other then gaming the engines.
cloaking is a banned reason for google search. read http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality
andre75 said it right... however, I would like to include one more stuff here, and that is the intention or motive of cloaking. BMW was once banned by Google because the company adopted javascript cloaking in order to game the search engine robots by trying to show a neat, user-friendly content to its visitors while keywords-stuffed, spammy content for the Search Engine. Cloaking is not always punishable. As Andre said targeting the different language market is a type of cloaking which Google will never probably frown on. Neither me have cloaked as yet.