WHY GOOGLE IS AGAINST CLOAKING AND HOW IT FIGHTS IT

Google is trying hard to fight against the practice of cloaking – this is the practice of using different web page content for crawling by a search engine spider from that which ordinary Internet users will see when they do an online search. Cloaking is thus a type of Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique that certain ecommerce companies use to get better rankings on a search engine. But regardless of whether the ecommerce company guilty of cloaking is a small enterprise or a major corporation, Google is strictly against the practice and will eliminate such violators from its search engine index.
The funny thing about companies that opt to resort to cloaking is that eventually they will be found out anyway, so the practice of cloaking is rather short-sighted actually. All the principal search engines have an anti-cloaking policy in their online use guidelines. For a website owner to resort to cloaking means he is willing to risk being banned from being posted on future search results after being caught doing cloaking.
To do cloaking, the devious website has to figure out whether a user who is asking about a certain web page is an Internet user or a search engine spider, based on which IP address is being used or who is the User-Agent of the user. The devious website that thinks the user is a search engine spider will then use a server script to supply a different type of web page, specifically to fool search engine spiders.
To determine if a website is resorting to cloaking, Google will either do a manual check or use algorithms. Either way, Google can still detect the so-called undetectable cloaking some companies resort to. If you do get tempted to resort to cloaking, bear in mind that you only benefit in the short term that way – if you get caught, your site will never be able to return to the search engine search results afterwards.
Ethical or White Hat SEO methods are always better to use to derive positive results, especially since search engines don’t appreciate any attempts to manipulate them.
Another practice that Google frowns upon is the purchase and sale of links by certain webmasters. These webmasters do this to try to manipulate rankings on search engines like Google, which prompts Google to secure its index quality by enforcing Google webmaster guidelines.
Lately, Google has been trying out new voting features for Google search results, which resemble those on Digg. This development may permit users to eventually vote up or just bury whatever search results crop up. But Google has not decided whether to extend the practice beyond the experimental period lasting a certain number of weeks.
Google will be analyzing the year 2007 search patterns to find out what new interesting changes in the global cultural system are occurring.
For one thing, it seems that companies need to understand who are the types of people who are inclined to click on their ads, since companies are placing more importance on ad revenues to boost their profit margin. This is happening as less people are clicking on the ads nowadays.
Google has also observed that there are less active spammers nowadays due to less spam mail being sent to the Gmail system in 2007. This may mean that the efficient spam filters of Google have helped frustrate spammers to a great degree.

Original Article by Sarah Folgea from Ace Internet Marketing