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Candidates for URL Cloaking

Introduction.

Usually, the people who want help with cloaking fall into one of four types.

The URL cloaking types.

  • Never had it. Never will.

    Your site is a programming masterpiece. It is full of great content, completely dynamic, and extremely appealing to humans. The only downside is you have never had a single visitor arrive at your site from a search engine. Redesigning the site isn't an option because your conversion rates are quite good.

    For sites like these, there are no downsides to cloaking. The threat of getting banned, from search engine results you never had, isn't something woth worrying about.

  • You've got it. But, you might lose it.

    You first built your site in 1995. Slowly, over time, you became the most relevant and dominant site in your niche. You get a great deal of traffic. However, your old, static site has become far too difficult to maintain.

    It's time to move to a database-driven system. You want one using all kinds of cool content mangement and ecommerce tools. URL's are going to change, and the overall site navigation is going to change as well.

    For situations like this, cloaking is also an ideal solution. If you do nothing, you lose the search engine traffic you worked long and hard to get. If you cloak, you preserve the old site (and listings). At the same time, you seamlessly route human visitors to your new content.

  • It's payback time.

    Like the previous type, you were the first one to move into your neighborhood. When you got started, there were about 50 competing web pages in your niche. Now there are 50,000.

    All of a sudden, everytime you sit down to do a little competitive research, you find some new johnny-come-lately using chunks of your code. They use everything from the wording of your H1 tags, to the location of your hyperlinks.

    Rather than sit by and continue to watch people rip you off, you decide to cloak. You hope this defends your work. Plus, it serves your competitors some seriously posioned code.

    In this type of situation, the risks of getting kicked-out, of even the most strict search engine, are pretty slim.

  • It's Never Enough.

    You run a site in a fairly competitive niche. You get a decent amount of traffic from most search engines, but you never seem to show up at the top.

    You figure if you start cloaking, you'll be better able to pinpoint and exploit the algorithm weaknesses (they all have some) of each search engine. You drool over the incredible R&D advantage cloaking provides. The thought of being in the top 5 keeps you awake at night.

    You are obsessed.

    You are the type most likely to get caught and banned. You'll end up losing steady, long-term traffic, for a quick short term boost.

    Conclusion.

    Evaluate your situation. If you fall somewhere in the first three, don't worry too much about trying cloaking. If you fall into the last category, understand there are definite risks.


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