Cloaking and Page Optimization
There are two sides to the cloacking issue. Cloaking, by the way, is using scripts
that hide certain pages from browsers while giving them out to search engines
only. On one hand, according to a recent I-Search Special Issue on cloaking, Marc
Krellenstein the Senior VP of Engineering for Northern Light said, "If we
find out 'your' page is cloaked we will ban your URL and sites for life."
According to I-Search, Inktomi and AltaVista share similar sentiments towards
cloaking. On the other hand, cloaking is something that is very commonly used
by high-level web designers for legitimate reasons such as directing users with
different browser capabilities to different pages, and also by advanced web marketers
to improve search engine rankings while hiding the high ranking HTML from competitors.
Despite the fact that most engines frown upon it and indeed do penalize some
pages that use cloaking technology, a great majority of cloaked pages still go
un-penalized, working effectively towards their goal. One reason is that its not
easy for the engines to find cloaked pages, another is that cloaking can be very
legitimate so it is let by anyway when found.
So where does that leave you? If you know what you are doing and have a legitimate
reason to use cloaking, proceed carefully. It can be highly fruitful. If you don't
know what you are doing, it is best not to cloak your pages. In general, it's
a good idea for most webmasters to stay away from cloaking. If you would like
to know more about cloaking, try http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak1.html
As for page optimization (making web pages designed to rank highly on search
engines and drive the resulting traffic to the main site), many professionals
now agree that creating frame pages that have optimized html in the <noframes>
tag while framing the main site is the best way to go. This is perfectly OK by
the engines when used responsibly. If you wish to use software to rapidly create
these pages, consider using PositionWeaver
PRO.
Correct Search Engine Submission
It is widely known now that some of the automated submission tools do not do
a good job at submitting a site to the search engines. One major problem is that
some engines do not want more than one page submitted to them from the same domain
within a 30-minute period. They're set that way to catch spammers. And most engines
do not want the same page submitted to them within the same 24-hour period. Now
there is a tool called the Search
Engine Commando that is fully safe and easy to use. It has built in rules
that enable it to submit your pages in the same responsible and effective manner
that a professional search engine marketer would, making sure that you will not
be tagged for spamming or have your submission ignored for failing to observe
the rules.
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Pay-per-click search engines are becoming an effective way to get targeted
traffic to websites. What happens is that you submit your site to them and bid
for a top ranking. So for a few cents per click through, your site is ranked at
the top for your selected keyword searches. Whenever someone clicks through to
your site, your account is debited the amount of cents you bid earlier at setup
time for each click through. The most popular pay per click search engine, the
one that started it all, is GoTo.com. The best thing about these engines is that
you set the amount of money you are willing to pay for per click through, and
you know exactly how highly your site will be ranked for your selected keywords.
It is a guaranteed way to drive traffic to your site at a price you select. For
more information see payperclicksearchengines.com
Interesting Tidbits
A new study
by Cyveillance shows that the Web has grown to more than 2.1 billion documents.
It is growing at the rate of 7 million pages per day.
Google.com is now the largest search engine; with a full-text index of 560
million URLs in June, plus a further 500 million URLs that it has never actually
visited but can potentially come in on a search results set.
You may have certain pages that you need to have excluded from search engine
indexing for one reason or another. While you could use the META robots tag to
control this, many engines now ignore that tag. Your best bet is to use a robots.txt
file, which is placed in your root folder. All major engines and many smaller
ones make use of robots.txt files. To find out more about this versatile file,
see:
http://www.wdj.co.uk/articles/submitting_to_search_engines.html
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html
