Can your core web site get banned by the search engines for cloaking? If that was true, then your competitor could build some cloaked domains and point them to your primary web site so that it would be banned! Think of the damage that would be done if that was at all true. Not a very likely scenario, is it?

So can you really have your “cloaked” domains banned for cloaking? The answer is yes – if, for example, the search engines’ staff have manually checked and compared your spider content with what you are actually serving your human visitors. In a worst case scenario a human editor may come along to check the matter out.

On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that you will get penalized or banned unless some silly campaign build mistake has taken place. If a cloaking campaign is implemented professionally and with sound marketing techniques, your chances of being banned are minimal.

Note that I do NOT condone cloaking for misleading purposes: it is counter productive and will only serve to make life more difficult for all parties concerned.

So can cloaking be abused? Sure it can! But so are kitchen knives and painkillers. I for my part have never advocated misleading search engine optimization, if only because it’s dumb marketing. There’s no excuse in the world for misleading visitors like that and it certainly doesn’t seem to pay off either, which is why the SERPs is actually seeing less and less of such practises these days.

But let’s face realities here: while the search engines may take a strong-arm stance against cloaking in public, they don’t really seem to worry too much about it in everyday life, even if they state otherwise.

One of the reasons being that there’s so much legitimate cloaking about, it would simply be impossible to weed it all out. Else, you might well expect the world’s top 1000 web properties to disappear from the SERPs.

It’s quite important to realize this fact before fretting about the possible penalization of cloaking, as so many clueless SEOs are preaching, without a single tangible proof of what they’re claiming to know absolutely everything about.

The responses just show how diverse people’s through are on Black SEO.

Great responses on Twitter!

I love the Cartoon!

There are obviously exceptions to the rule: sometimes good content does somewhat “naturally” take off. Some content is just made to be shared and it truly doesn’t take much to get the ball rolling. Outreach through a newsletter formed the old fashioned way, or uptake on Reddit or another community is most likely not a manipulation of the link graph.

I’m not saying this type of content is common… but there are occassions where literally “if you build it, they will come.”

Clearly this is the exception to the rule and I doubt anyone who refers to themselves as an SEO relies solely on this theory/type of behaviour. I just wanted to point out that there is such a thing as “whitehat SEO” (aka onpage optimisation coupled with luck) but it usually requires a seriously talented marketing team to create something that needs very little help in attracting links.