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Dan Kramer Interview
Jim Boykin mentioned to me that he would love for me to get an interview with Dan Kramer so here it is. In doing a little research I find that Dan is knowledgeable on cloaking so this will be a timely interview now that Matt Cutts has made it little more clear as to how his search engine deals with this dark art. But is it a dark art? Let’s ask Dan some good ways we can use cloaking to better present out products, ideas and services.
Hello Dan and welcome to SEOBUZZBOX.com!
Thanks Aaron. I’m afraid I missed the session where Matt Cutts was talking about cloaking. That will teach me to sleep in and miss important information here at Pubcon!
Hehe I was actually referring to his blog where he answered someones question about cloaking. Why don’t you start off by telling us about your history on the internet that relates to marketing and the forums you visit?
I was a graphic artist in the 90’s working for a company who wanted a presence on the web. Being computer literate, I was drafted to learn HTML and create their website. Soon, I was completely addicted and making sites of my own, and dabbling in early affiliate programs, SEO, etc.
My first site went live back in 1996. Pretty early on I realized thatcertain techniques would get sites better rankings in Alta Vista and Infoseek. Once I got the SEO bug and my online income exceeded my day job income, I left my employer and started my own design and optimization firm,Volatile Graphix, Inc. in 1997.
Some of the work I do is involved in cataloging search engine spiders, and WebmasterWorld’s Search Engine Spider Identification Forum was a very good resource. I ended up moderating that forum, which I still do. I am also the moderator of the WMW Cloaking forum.
Lets briefly talk about your URL www.IHateGoogle.org are you really one of these Google haters who hate them so much that they make millions of dollars in Adsense revenue from their splogs each day?
IHateGoogle.org was a domain that I had registered on a lark once upon a time and was just sitting there with nothing on it. Eventually, I realized that I needed a blog to record certain information (such as IP addresses of spiders) and maybe do a little ranting and raving on about various search related topics. The domain name was memorable, so that was where I set up.
Technically, I’mnot a Google-hater that makes millions from Adsense on the blog, because I use Yahoo! Publisher Network there, LOL. Really, I’m not much of a Google-hater, anyway, although I am often critical of Google and some of their business practices. Note that Ialso have the domain ILoveGoogle.org and it is mapped to the same blog.
It’s always entertaining to poke fun at the “big guys” in the industry, but I don’t limit myself to Google. If I come across interesting stories or ideas about the other big players, I don’t hesitate to publish those.
Ok, let’s get right to cloaking and we will make it a three part question mkay?
1. Describe what cloaking is so us newbie SEO’s can get a handle on it.
Cloaking is a lot simpler than many make it out to be. It’s the art of identifying your visitors, and displaying appropriate content based on who they are. For SEO purposes, the goal is to indentify search engine spiders and serve them optimized HTML. Everybody else gets a landing page of some sort designed to maximize sales, etc.
2. Give us a lesson on what is the dark art of cloaking.
Cloaking is “dark” because search engines want to rank sites based on what human visitors see. They don’t like to have their ranking algos “played with” by evil webmasters who have only their own pocketbooks in mind.
Actually, the purpose of cloaking has more to do with defense than purposefully trying to deceive search engines and human visitors. By defense, I mean one of the main goals of SEO cloaking is keeping competitors from page-jacking or scraping the HTML that is indexed in the engines. SEOs need to be aware that cloaking is not some kind of magic bullet that improves search engine rankings. It is only a small part of a marketer’s strategy. Also, remember that on-page factors have become less important over time. There are a lot of other factors, such as incoming links, themeing, and traffic patterns that are becoming more and more prevalent in search engine ranking algos that have nothing to do with cloaking.
3. Give us a lesson on uses of cloaking that you feel are legit.
There are several uses for cloaking that are more “legitimate” than SEO cloaking. For instance, there are many sites that use geolocation cloaking. They look up the IP address of the visitor and determine which country the visitor is from and display contentaimed at that location. Also, some sites run on a subscription business model and cloak their content so that search engine spiders have access to it without being subscribed. Another example would be people with unindexable content, such as Flash websites… they might want to cloak so search engines get a text version of their website.
Tell us about Kloakit and will you be offering a $100 coupon like you did at Pubcon?
There is in fact a Pubcon discount for KloakIt. It’s a $100.00 discount of an unlimited domains license. To get the discount, go to the download page at and enter the coupon code “Boston” (without quotes). The discount is good until May 18th.
Tell us about your time at Pubcon Boston, did you get a chat with Matt Cutts? Got any highlights?
I haven’t had the opportunity to chat with Matt yet this time. I don’t know if he’d appreciate talking with the “adversary” (smile). But, I suppose I’ll have to approach him with a business card in hand just for laughs anyway.
Thanks for stopping in Dan.
Thank you!
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
It’s interesting to note that Matt Cutts says it’s OK to present different content based on user referrer, ip etc as long as it is not served to the same URI
While in Japan recently I couldn’t use blogger.com as it fired up http://www.blogger.com/start (the home page) in Japanese, with no way to change it. I’m sure that’s the kind of cloaking that Google disapproves of?
April 25th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Just a follow-up… I did have a chance, finally, to introduce myself to Matt Cutts at Pubcon Boston 2006, and found out he’s a guy with an excellent sense of humor. He actually seemed pleased to meet an unapologetic cloaker :)
April 25th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Yep he is one of a kind I have heard in person. ;)