Questioning Prominance of Backlinks over Cloaking

[imulus]

I've been working hard to get legitimate companies better placed in Google's results via backlinking with industry trade associations, publications and networking, blogs and etc.. without going down the spam / cloaking route.

I'm not able to mention names, but often I'm finding that competitors with very poor backlinks (from what I can tell) are ranking higher then my clients who have very legitimate links. However the one universal difference are these competitors are cloaking their site content.

It seems to me that for all the hoopla around algorithms, cloaking seems to be doing a decent job at faking out the engines.

Is there ANYTHING anyone can point to which suggest Google is actually detecting and removing cloaked sites from their index? I can only justify the legal / legitimate route to my clients for so long, until they point to their competitors and say "why can't we do that?"....

[sootledir]

I don't see the advantage of cloaking. More backlinks will overpower the on-page content anyway, at some point.

[dannysullivan]

Yes, I hear plenty of anecdotal evidence that Google is indeed catching cloaked sites and penalizing them by removal. Similarly, there's plenty of evidence that cloaked sites and other sites using spamming techniques still get left in, despite spam reports even being filed. The answer is three fold. Google, like any search engine, doesn't catch everything. Second, in some cases, they might see a spam technique being used but decide the user isn't being harmed, so the content might be allowed to slip by. Last, Google generally likes to come up with some automated solution for removing spam. That means it may let a lot of junk fester, then suddenly there's a housecleaning, and a lot of people get wiped out.

Basically, I would say that the tactics you are using should eventually pay off. You could try going the other route, but there's no guarantee that you'll be successful, any more than this might be the exact reason why your competitors are doing well. There's definitely the chance you might get penalized. Ultimately, the decision is yours. You have to weigh up how likely you think cloaking content might work against the risk you might get caught, especially if outed by someone else.

[imulus]

I don't want to go down the cloaking route unless I can fully justify it, as in the case of a fully flash enabled page / site. Danny, I'll just take your recommendation and stay the course and cross my fingers that Google will eventually automate the removal. I've been looking for that solution since 2001 and I thought they would have figured this out by now, however I guess they have more important issues like clickfraud and expansion to worry about.

[seomike]

If you plan on cloaking I would make sure you are using the best IP delivery software out there. Take full use of the no cache meta tags to keep your cache between you and the search engines.

As far a cloaking and core sites goes know that if you are tagged as a bad neighborhood you have the potential of taking your link partners down with you since they will be linking in to a bad neighborhood. If you bring them down with you that may open you up for legal liabilities.