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The issue of website cloaking bubbled to the surface of the search engine optimization world again, as a handful of noteworthy names debated the tactic and WebmasterWorld's alleged use of it over time.

Cloaking Concerns Over WebmasterWorld

Cloaking was much simpler to understand in years past. Dracula wore one. The Shadow practically embodied the concept. Romulans and Klingons made use of cloaking throughout Star Trek's history. On the Internet, cloaking holds a more serious place than it does in the fantasy of horror, mystery, or science fiction. It's very much a fact that some sites can and will disguise their content to present themselves as one thing to search engines, and something different to human visitors. WebmasterWorld received scrutiny and discussion recently. Famed Googler Matt Cutts blogged about the latest episode in the cloaking saga, evidently after discussing it privately with Philipp Lenssen. Matt recounted a short history involving Philipp and WebmasterWorld; he has concerns about what people going from Google to WebmasterWorld may see:

When I get a chance to tackle Philipp’s most recent report, I’ll be looking at consistency: when a Google user clicks on a search result at Google, they should always see the same page that Googlebot saw.

What people see formed the focus of a late February post Philipp wrote about Google allowing misrepresented result snippets. That now appears to be resolved:

In a nutshell, the WebmasterWorld discussion forums – which frequently pop up in Google search results – often served a registration page on a different URL instead of the content the user clicked on in Google. Matt now indicates that he investigated on this behavior and discussed it with Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, who then implemented code changes around January 8. The common behavior is that you can now see content of WebmasterWorld pages fine the first time you click on the result.

WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke responded to Matt's post and explained why Philipp and others have seen results that don't always go to content:

As most know, wmw has been the target of extreme amounts of bot activity over the years and has taken proactive steps to fight it. Our first and foremost job is to the regular members of the site. I have done everything I can think of to stop the bots from the cable and dsl isp’s. I have even gone so far as to ban entire TLDs some of time (china, russia) where heavy botnet activity exists. I think we have finally found a system that everyone can live with and keeps the content open for everyone, but slows down the bots. I say slows down, because there is no way to stop them.

Matt still plans to look at WebmasterWorld in relation to Philipp's February post. One person who would like to see the whole cloaking issue put to rest is Danny Sullivan, who aired his views on the subject, including a long history of other cloaking issues:

Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh. I guess now that the SEO industry has had the required twice-yearly debate about the reputation of SEO, it's time to do the go round about cloaking once again. The comments are now up over 100, as people rehash things that have been hashed, mashed, rebaked so many times before.

It's a "stupid, stupid issue" that Danny wants to see SEO get past once and for all. ---