If
you are Thinking of Using Cloaking....
I have been considering "cloaking"
for some time. I have heard much on both sides - both pro and
con. And after much consideration, I determined the Con
outweighed any Pros that could be achieved by simple hard
work, at least for me. I'll still leave the choice up to
you.
The Pros of Cloaking.....
Basically, Url cloaking can be an important
feature when you are building and managing your
website. Essentially url cloaking allows you to forward a viewer
from the website they typed in to another website without them
knowing it. The end result is the same for the viewer, but
it can work to your advantage if you are trying to save bandwidth
on a given address.
Let's say that you were lucky enough to snag
the domain name http://www.prizerecipes.com. However, the company
hosting your website only allows you a limited amount of bandwidth
per day, week, or month. You want to keep this great domain
as a way to draw customers to your business, but find that
you contantly exceen your your bandwidth limits.
Url Cloaking Helps You Manage Bandwidth
With url cloaking, you can set up your website at another url while the user
thinks he is at prizerecipes.com. This means that you'll receive the use
of your "prized" web address while actually using a website that
will allow you a high bandwidth usage.
Best of all, the customer has no idea
this happening. Even the address bar in his browser will
display the original website. In this way you can provide
your customer with better service as well as make matters
far more convenient for yourself.
The Cons of Cloaking.....
My reason for my consideration of cloaking
was a close friend is a SEO. After achieving top ranking,
she found many sites popping up with almost identical tags.
She felt that all the work she had put into the Tags and Optimization
were, in effect, stolen. She wanted to know how to hide the
tags from prying competitive eyes.
What she was looking for is called "cloaking,"
which is supposed to hide all the hard work you put into your
optimization and thus, preserving your high rankings from being
stolen by competitors.
Cloaking scripts identify search engine spiders
when they "crawl" your site, by the spiders'
IP address or by User Agent variables. The cloaking script
then shows the optimized webpages only to the spiders, while
your visitors are presented with a different page - normally
a redirect to the home page. There are may cloaking scripts
available, however I chose, at this time, not use
cloaking scripts for two reasons:
- You can get your site permanently banned.
Cloaking is considering spamming or tricking the search engine.
If Google detects you doing this, you could be banned permanently.
And how do they cathc you out of the millions of websites?
By you competition turning you in and someone at Google checking
it out.
- Ranking can't be easily manipulated. In
the "old days" it used to be that Google and other
Search Engines would rank you site by the elements contained
solely on your webpage - metatags, headlines, content, etc.
In those days, cloaking made more sense for sites with a top
position, as all the hard work could just be "stolen"
and used on a ompetitors'.
However, in todays inernet marketing scene, the keyword metatag
is no longer used for ranking and the description metatag
isn't nearly as important. Search engines index
your site by analyzing your entire web page -- especially
the title, headlines, body text, and keyword density -- but
they rank your web page based on several
factors, including the quantity and quality of incoming links
to your site. It may be that the majority of the ranking algorithm
is comprised of factors external to your web site.
Until I am able to administer the script
myself, or can really trust the technician who implements it,
I will continue to spend time building good content and honest
promotion. Afterall, YOU found me, didn't you?
The choice is yours. But, in the long run,
don't jeopardize your sites ranking and your livelihood until
you understand the game.
- - - - - - - -
About the Author
Suzanne Fyhrie owns and operates OneWay
Advertising and Design. OneWay is a full-service Christian
Advertising agency providing marketing, advertising and graphic
design services for on and off the Internet. Her clientele reach
from Montana to Trinidad. Email: info@onewayadv.com
1/2004
