
SEOMoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 - epi0Bauqu
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors?2009
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sharpn
Interesting - especially useful that 'engagement with the blogosphere' rates
higher than 'great content' in the survey. Not sure how true that is in
practice, but it's a consideration. I liked how they included a
'consensus/contention' metric alongside their percentage ratings.

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mmorris
It is a bit odd about content and blogosphere engagement.

That being said, I think that having great (or at least good) content is a
part of what leads to increased engagement with the blogosphere. I don't think
it's necessarily easy to separate the two cleanly. Not that there aren't other
aspects to blogosphere interaction as well, of course.

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henning
If cloaking were so bad for SEO, why does crap from Expert Sex Change come up
every time I do a .NET-related search?

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fallentimes
Because Google lets big brands get away with murder. The bigger you are the
easier it is to get away with paid links/spamming/cloaking/etc.

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thwarted
Even if it's a "big brand" only because of their less than savory SEO
techniques? The only reason I know of expertsexchange.com is because of the
way they show up in search results, not because their name is a household
word.

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mikeyur
They're a 'big brand' to Google because of the domain authority (registered in
96) and the hundreds of thousands of pages of unique content.

Back on topic: "cloaking" typically refers to hiding sketchy links, not hiding
content or charging for it as Expert Sex Change does.

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sireat
A few years back cloaking in SEO world was understood to be the process of
serving different content depending on the IP address of the visitor(not to be
confused with geolocation), with the explicit goal of showing keyword
optimized page to search engines and the regular user getting a more user
friendly page.

In my book, this is very similar to what Expert Sex Change does. Come referred
by Google you get a nice answer at the bottom, come "clean" and you've got to
pay for the answer. Very evil.

If you are a big guy (one infamous case was BMW Germany) you can do it, get
caught and then recover from Google ban within a week. If you are a small site
and get caught don't expect to do so.

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mikeyur
Yea, there are lots of different definitions of 'cloaking' in SEO. Didn't know
that Expert Sex Change did that with referrals. A lot of people did it in the
past by looking at user agents.

I had some friends who would send googlebot to a clean, keyword-optimized
piece of content, but the user would get sent to a page plastered in porn ads
and would cookie stuff the crap out of their system.

