Ethics of cloaking
I’ve done this one before, so this is more of an update. Often times the ethics of cloaking are brought up in conversations about cloaking. The bottom line is that cloaking is a tool and like any other tool the real issue is how you use that tool. If you are using cloaking to display completely relevant pages to your users, allowing yourself to get better search engine results and provide content that people are actually looking for, then you are using cloaking as it is meant to be used. On the other hand if you are creating cloaked pages to draw attention to your site just to get people there with no regard to the content, or even intentionally misleading people just to get them to your site, then that is the area that I call unethical. There is some gray areas in this as well, nothing is black and white. If you are writing a cloaked page to draw someone to your content that is on topic and legitimate, what happens if your cloaked content displaces a more relevant web site that would have been more use to the web surfer? Is this unethical or survival of the fittest? This of course is for everyone to decide for themselves, but it is always something to think about. IMHO, the bottom line of every website is one simple phrase, which I believe I learned over at jimworld.com: “Content is King” Optimize your site as much as you want, cloak it to get to the top of every search engine, but if you don’t have compelling content no one will stay for very long and no one will return.
