Search engine ranking on your website is very important for your marketing campaigns. It’s vital if you want to stay in business and make a living online.I know last time I lost a 3 rank on one of my sites. It could have been for alot of reasons.

1. I changed my site around and didn’t use proper redirects.

2. I cloak some of my affiliate links. Hey I have to make a living too.

It is natural that search engines have responded badly to cloaking because it is a deceptive act.The problem on your end is that
sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against theft  of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these
days due to the use of “off page” elements.

Like I said I do redirect some of my affiliate links and I’m sure most affiliates do in one way or another, but it is a big risk factor. So many dishonest webmaster’s have used it as a way to raise page rank in the past. Cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. I do not cloak in that respect, I redirect, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the same thing.

The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the
list.
I’m still indexed and do get traffic from some of my keywords, but it’s very frustrating when you see your ranking totally disappear. I am hoping in April my rank for that site will come back up. Although some people declare rank is not important that could be because they are  not using accepted SEO practices themselves and have been dropped.

More on this subject tomorrow .

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.