Punishing a visitor from Google with a subscription login page, where the visitor expected to find content based on the search result, could draw a penalty from the search ad company.
There are two words that are guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any website proprietor: penalties and filters.
They damage rankings and ultimately may result in banishment from the search engines. However, before panic sets in, let us guide you through the basics of penalties and filters.
A penalty is caused by significant violations of a search engine's website guidelines, such as:
Don't buy paid links! Paid links are bad! Don't cloak either. Search engines don't allow it. You've all heard this before right?>>> What are your thoughts on paid links? Do you agree with Google's hard line? Comment here...
A Danish company provided the daily allowance of raised eyebrows for its claim of offering undetectable cloaking techniques.
The official Google Webmaster Central Blog says within 6 weeks, an overall overhauled Webmaster central – both its Content and Organization will be unveiled.
The automotive world can get pretty shady, but it still came as a surprise when Yahoo was recently caught “serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users.” This is known as “cloaking,” and it took place on the Yahoo Autos site.
A nice little find by Niall Donegan who discusses Unison.ie cloaking:
A prime example of this is Unison.ie. When searching for current Irish news it usually ranks fairly high on Google, however all the pages require you register first before you view them. The registration gives no advantage to people like me who just want to a quick look at the latest news. I suspect that I’m not alone and that lots of people will just go back and look for another site.
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.
The concept of page cloaking has come under fire; again, because the idea is being used by a number of legitimate sites in order to protect or hide their content from users and/or search engine bots. The fact that these sites do not get punished for using cloaking techniques has become a sore spot with some bloggers.
Euphemisms are used in many areas of politics.