Search Engine Cloaking

[Durandal]

I've stumbled over "Search Engine Cloaking" while doing some research on Internet Marketing. Doing a search on "Search Engine Cloaking" gives you dozens of companies that promise great search engine results - but usually for a steep price. For some reason these companies are always close to those "revolutionary" Internet Marketing MLM programs.
Is this all a hoax or can I expect results for - say - $199 per month?

[Tiger_Tom]

I wouldn't bother with this unless your site is
doing really well, and you're in a viciously competitive
industry like real-estate or p*rn. You can get a cloaking
script at http://www.kloakit.com, if you want.
This sort of software is pricey because it has to be constantly updated.

TigerTom
http://www.tigertom.com/web-site-design.shtml : for Internet
merchant account advice [and non-script-based cloaking tricks!]

[fantomaster]

The chief issue with cloaking programs is their engine list of search engine spider IPs.

As all serious cloaking software will work by IP delivery (don't even think of touching a merely UserAgent based script - there are still quite a few of those around, and they're so easy to fool it's pathetic; also, they may get you banned with the SEs in no time ...), it is crucial to have regularly updated spider lists.

They should also be international in scope.

This is of great importance because global networks being what they are, many major search engines have implemented time and bandwidth sharing plus load balancing in assigning crawling tasks to their vast range of spiders.

Hence, it is not advisable to restrict such a project (as so many companies seem to be doing) to "the major search engines generating 90% of the traffic anyway". While it is true that a mere handful of major engines accounts for the lion share of overall search traffic, spidering and indexing activity (which is, after all, what search results are based on) is a totally different story.

Two examples to illustrate this: A web site submitted to a US based major engine like Go/Infoseek may well be spidered by Infoseek's Japanese spider. If you submit your site to AltaVista (Netherlands), the spider crawling your site will come from AltaVista (UK).

Hence, only a comprehensive and global database will ensure that these search engine spiders are actually recognized for what they are in order to feed them with appropriate content for optimized rankings.