Being fairly new to SEO, my research thus far has shown a lot of competing websites in my industry using cloaking to help their rankings. Anyone use cloaking successfully? Anyone had negative effects from cloaking? What cloaking software do you use?
If you have a legit business in a competative area there is no way you should be risking cloaking. Even if you manage to rank a cloaked page which is no different from a regular page in competative areas you are facing potencial ban which will come quickly in competative areas. Also this is basiclly a whitehat forum, so you wont learn anything about cloaking for blackhat. Check out other websites that support this since you seem to be new at cloaking anyway.
Eh, you're a little off. Only the site you cloak will get banned, not the one you redirect to. Otherwise, guys would cloak to their competitors pages. I've used search engine cloaker with moderate results. Nothing incredible, but I've made a few bucks off it.
My personal view is that cloaking is a pretty pointless method of search engine optimization. There are better ways of achieving the same result with no worries about getting banned and potentially greater pay offs in the end. It's radical, I know, but why not create a good, worthwhile site that people (yup, yer actual real people) will use and return to.
You are using the "if so then a competitor can do it" too loosely. If you are in a competitive market and your website doesnt belong there while a manual review happens you are risking the chance of getting removed. Sure, its a method that works. But again why would you risk this on a major website? If your website is garbage to begin with and your in for the quick money then go for it. Also about the competitor sabotaging others rankings has been done many times and its a practice that people apply all the time.
It looks like most are saying that cloaking does work, but you may be taking a risk. How high is that risk? Has anyone been banned themselves specifically for cloaking?
Didnt Bwm.De get removed from google for this i cant post urls but search google for "bmw.de google ban" and its the top link
It depends on your motives for cloaking and what exactly you are cloaking. If you are using a bandwidth detector to display different content to dial-up users this is obviously not a malicious action. I cant beleive a SE would ban you for something that imrpoves your user's experience. If youre only intentions are to exploit the SEs, dont do it. If you have a legitimate use for cloaking...do it...The user should come first.
Here's the link to that article: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-04-n60.html The interesting thing that i took from that article is that the BMW site had the offending cloaked doorway pages for over two years. Which is kinda sad on Google's part. If it takes 2 years for a major site like that to get caught cloaking, how much longer can one of us get away with it? UPDATE: I just checked the BMW.de site and it is back up to a PR7. LOL. so they get away with spamming for 2 years. get caught and google lets them back into the index. LOL. Thats just rediculous.
To address your concerns 1) Cloaking a website that doesn't belong in the market in most cases is useless. Why would someone looking for dog treats click on my porn site link? 2) "Also about the competitor sabotaging others rankings has been done many times and its a practice that people apply all the time." Sure, but not by using cloaking 3) What are you risking? The end site that recieves your cloaked, redirected traffic doesn't get banned (in my experience, not to say this could never happen).
I cloak quite a few of my domains, and have been doing it for over 3 years and have never been banned.
BMW.DE was re-instated in like a week. You can be sure there was a discussion about this ... and I bet one of 'em was "we got away with this for two years and made a million bucks - but we got banned for a week ... ummmmm ... can we get away with it again?" Google sent a great message when they banned 'em - I was disappointed by the followup though.
One thing you to consider is that cloaking isnt an out of the box miracle technique. You still need to figure out the keyword density, keywords, titles, links etc. and do it all in a way to get high search results but to not raise a spam flag. In regards to performance, I had some great success with cloaking about 1-2 years ago, getting 1,000+ uniques a day on each cloaking for very-very competitive keywords. I basically stopped cloaking, but tried it out again about a few months ago and I have had very minimal success.