Cloaking

The New York Times and thousands of other sites get away with IP-targeted cloaking to get their 'premium (subscription) content' indexed in the SERPS. Even SeoMoz openly states that they use this "clever" form of cloaking in order to drive targeted traffic to their site. Who can blame them?!

So how far can you take this whole Cloaking argument?

Flash
A beautifully designed flash site like http://www.exhibit-e.com/' offers an extremely accessible non-flash alternative on every page: if you have flash you get a pretty site if you don't have it installed you get a lo-res site. The content is still basically the same, so admittedly this is not really cloaking.

JavaScript
Presumably Google reads the NOSCRIPT tag. So filling that tag up with lots of juicy keyword-rich text would seem like a good idea. I don't see that as cloaking (a bannable offence) because a small percentage of your sites visitors who have JS disabled will see that content. So effectively the SEs will see the same as some real visitors.

The larger point I'm getting to is this: 99% of people will see a Flash, Javascript site. So, if clever SEOs use highly targeted textual content for the non-JavaScript and non-Flash options on their pages, what is the argument for that being counted as cloaking?

Really interested to hear what everyone thinks!

All Google has to do is drop the hammer on sites using these "techniques" and then suddenly it doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Its harder to get sites ranked without using underhand techniques like cloaking (or other so-called black-hat methods) than it is to test your mettle and go by the Google Rule Book.

This is why there is more admiration for those at the top of the SEO game who only use so-called white hat methods and gain those top spots.

There is cloaking and there is robot-allowance indexing. They are two different things. Webmasterworld.com allows googlebot to index their content but users must login or register to view it. Google has no problem with this. It is not cloaking. Nobody sees anything different. All it does is identify the googlebot and let it browse, real people are not allowed to browse. Again no problems here. If you start showing googlebot different content than real users then you get in trouble.

Don't quote me on this but I do believe Google was going to do something about that at WMW and experts-exchange.com. I forgot where I read it but it was a good source. I'll see if I can hunt it down for everyone.

Sounds interesting - would be great if you could find the article

Have you had any luck tracking it down stymiee?

I'd be interested to see that. Especially since I could swear a google employee stated on the blog one time that they allowed it. They must have some sort of allowance there because they disabled the cache for all the WMW results.

Found it at Matt Cutt's blog.

Does anyone still see special content from WMW being served up in the SERPs?

Hmm interesting. If Matt screws WMW he is pretty stupid. But we will see. I have seen some WMW pages in the index lately but not as many as usual. That could be that I haven't done as many searches that would bring up their pages however.
I will keep tabs on this because it will be interesting to see what happens. Thanks for the link and heads-up!

Do you consider this "screwing"" WMW? I would see it as forcing them to play fair like everyone else.

One set of rules for one lot of sites, another set for another. Yeah, that could be seen as screwing people around.

Google have turned a blind eye to this in the past because they need to have good content in the SERPs. Obviously, there's now either been too much chat about the subject for their inactions to go un-noticed or Google just feels the content isn't that valuable.

Yes I do. I generally believe Google is doing very well at keeping the spam down, I find Google to be very relevant and hardly ever have to do a search more than once HOWEVER they do have spam and I think they should work on that over stuff like this.
The guy who started WMW(for the life of me can't think of his name and I am too lazy to go find it) has put alot of work into it and created a great community. I think he has the right to only allow subscribers in if he wishes. According to Google here are his options:

Let users view everything for free/no login
Charge and no google listings for your subscriber content.


If it was me i think I would let users view any pages that came from Google searches but they would have to subscribe to view the rest of the forum. I think that would be fair.

And BTW if you noticed recently Volkswagon(http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/volkswagon-busted-using-blackhat-134229.html) was busted for using spam techniques and yet Google is going to work with them and let them off easy. However they are going to crack down on WMW.

good idea. I'll use it.