Cloaking. Isn't this a No No?

wwwDOTsearchenginecloakerDOTcom sells cloaking software and now someone is doing a hack for vBulletin based on the idea too.

I'm of the impression that this is a no no. Anyone care to enlighten me with a horror story? The G TOS is very clear on it IMO.

Thanks

 

Google can dictate whatever they like in their TOS, but ultimately they have no legal authority in what you do with your own site.

 

Yes, I'm aware of that. But in this world of kissing their feet, wouldn't this be a no no?

Should we ignore them and do it anyway? Would the SE God's cast us to hades?

I see alot of negitive things about this and recall a few stories, none of which I can quote however. Thus the question.

To me that listing is just too important. In the context of G, wouldn't this be suicidal?

I'm not talking free will here, I'm talking common sense.

 

Depends how good you are at cloaking and how good the search engines are at detecting it. For your average webmaster with limited coding skills who wants to be listed on Google then cloaking pages is a dumb idea and one which is guaranteed to get you dumped off the listings sooner or later.

There are still a few individuals out there who employ cloaking techniques to ensure high placings in the SERPS, although I think they are becoming fewer in number as the SE's get better at detecting the cloak. It typically only takes a visit by a human who has access to the spider logs to spot the cloaked pages. It's a very high risk strategy.

 

Personally, I think it's probably OK to do minor tweaks, such as strip-out the user widgets that the search engines have no use for (which also conserves bandwidth). But, rewriting the entire theme and content of the page is probably what most people/search engines would consider unethical.

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm thinking that the human thing would come into play if you got popular enough. Then all the work for naught maybe if caught. Ride a high just to fall flat.

I guess hit and run is a biz for some. But I don't feel like trying to be a jack of all trades, I want to work what I know for the long term.