Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea

[Advisor]

For anyone who may have missed this week's newsletter for whatever reason, you missed a very important article written by our very own Alan Perkins.

I think it's an important article for everyone in the SEO biz to read, so I'm taking the liberty of reprinting it here, along with my intro and comments at the end. The archived link to it at my site is here: Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea.

~~~Guest Article~~~

++Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea++

Our guest article today is one that is near and dear to my heart. I
asked my friend Alan Perkins to write it for me because I was sick of
seeing prominent people in our industry saying that cloaking is "okay
under certain circumstances." In reality, many who have made that
statement were not really talking about cloaking at all. For
instance, in an interview I published here last year with Stephen
Baker from FAST <http://www.highrankings.com/issue004.htm#seonews1> he
said, "Cloaked pages may be okay depending on their intent." But
guess what? Turns out he was talking about trusted XML feeds, not
cloaking.

Unfortunately, too many people misuse the term "cloaking." Even Danny
Sullivan has referred to XML feeds as cloaking, and so have many
others. As you will learn from the following article, trusted XML
feeds are NOT cloaking, nor are many other content delivery methods
that some people call cloaking. Once you understand what cloaking is
and isn't, you'll hopefully agree that cloaking is *always* a bad
idea.

So without further ado, here's Alan...

Guest Article
Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea
By Alan Perkins

All the search engines say "don't cloak" in their Webmaster FAQs.
That's pretty clear advice, isn't it? But wait. Why should the search
engines dictate how we create our sites? And don't search engines
themselves cloak - if they can, why not us?

What Is Cloaking?

To answer these *apparent* contradictions, you need to know what
search engines mean when they say "don't cloak." They all mean the
same thing, which Google defines as follows:

"The term 'cloaking' is used to describe a Website that returns
altered Web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words,
the Web server is programmed to return different content to [a search
engine] than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to
distort search engine rankings." (See:
<http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#cloaking>.)

So cloaking is something a server is programmed to do only when it
sees a search engine robot visiting the site. It's called 'cloaking'
because it involves hiding the content people will see, and
substituting it with content designed to rank higher in the search
engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engines have a problem with cloaking because it makes a mockery
of their ranking algorithms. These algorithms rank pages partly
according to what people will see on the page. When this information
is deliberately withheld, the algorithm cannot do its job. Cloaking is
the ultimate form of invisible text - nobody sees it, not even by
viewing the HTML source code.

Personalized Content Delivery Is Not Cloaking

One reason why there's so much debate over whether cloaking is okay or
not, is because there are other techniques Webmasters use on Websites
that some people call cloaking, when in reality, they're not cloaking
at all. Remember, cloaking is *only* showing one thing to people, and
another thing to search engine robots.

So, what about all these other things like geo-IP delivery, secure
content or personalised delivery?

Cloaking is none of these things. Cloaking is *only* an application
that exists to hide content from the search engines.

Here's a quick rule of thumb to help you understand what cloaking is
(and more importantly...what it isn't) - if you need to know a search
engine's IP address or some details from its HTTP request (e.g., its
user agent name) in order to deliver content, you are probably
cloaking. If you don't need that information, then you are certainly
not cloaking.

XML Feeds Are Not Cloaking

In the last couple of years search engines have introduced XML feeds -
a way of automatically submitting hundreds or thousands of pages to
some search engines, while providing extra information about those
pages that does not appear on the actual pages people will see. Some
people describe these XML feeds as cloaking, but they are absolutely
not cloaking. They are XML feeds that are sanctioned by the search
engine -- that's all. If you are delivering an XML feed to a search
engine, then of course the search engine knows about it. You are not
hiding anything from them, and therefore, you are not cloaking.
Cloaked content is almost always HTML, not XML.

Cloaking Is Not A Technology But An Application

Another thing you hear about cloaking is "cloaking is only a
technology; technology is passive - it's the application of technology
that makes it right or wrong." Let me clear this one up too.
Cloaking is *not* a technology. Cloaking is the application of other
technologies to do as I've described above. The other technologies in
question are things like IP delivery and user agent delivery, which
are passive technologies. They have many applications other than
cloaking and are not wrong or bad in and of themselves. Cloaking is
an application, not a technology.

Cloaking Is Deceptive Advertising

I am against cloaking, as defined in this article, because cloaking
amounts to deceptive advertising in the search results. To illustrate
this, I'll draw a quick comparison between cloaked content and
pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. Both offer ostensibly the same
thing: the ability to improve a page's position in the search results
without changing the content that searchers see. The difference is
that PPC advertisements are clearly labelled as advertisements.
Cloaking achieves a similar result, but it involves using deception to
obtain a commercial advantage. And, of course, the cloaked pages are
not clearly labelled in the search results because the search engine
did not know they were cloaked! So cloaking amounts to using
deception to obtain an unlabelled improved position for commercial
advantage - deceptive advertising.

Relevancy Makes No Difference

Another question you may have is what if the cloaked content is
relevant? Does that make it okay? Relevancy makes no difference.
PPC ads are relevant too (they are often checked by editors to ensure
this) but they still have to be labelled as advertising. An FTC
investigation into a complaint made by Ralph Nader's CommercialAlert
confirmed this last year. (See:
<http://www.commercialalert.org/index...article_id=113>.)

Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea

Hopefully you now know what cloaking is and what it isn't. You should
also now know why some people (and search engines) think it's a bad
idea.

The way to improve a page's position in the search results without
paying for advertising is to 1) make sure the search engine spider can
find and index the page, 2) improve the content on the page, and 3)
improve the positioning of the page within the Web as a whole. You
never need to cloak. A perceived need to cloak usually indicates a
more fundamental problem with a site. Solve that fundamental problem
and you will probably improve your site for your visitors. A better
return on investment -- for less effort!

Alan Perkins, Co-founder
e-Brand Management
http://www.ebrandmanagement.com

[Jill's comments: Alan has been a leader in the fight against search
engine spam for many years. Google reps often quote his white paper,
"The Classification of Search Engine Spam"
<http://www.ebrandmanagement.com/whit...lassification/>,
during the "Spam Police" sessions at the Search Engine Strategies
conferences.

As a side note, when I first read Alan's paper many years ago, I
didn't agree with it completely. In fact, I seem to remember
vehemently arguing against parts of it in a search engine forum.
Interestingly enough, I read it again a few weeks ago and found myself
in absolute total agreement with everything he wrote. I assumed that
Alan must have changed it over the years, yet he told me that he
hadn't. So if the paper hasn't changed, then what did? Hmm...maybe
Alan has me hypnotized or something! - J]

Jill