“Search engine” optimizers will tell you that keyword stuffing and cloaking is not a bad thing and that any site can rank on the first page of Google if it follows their exact formula. This is false. Strictly speaking, Google’s algorithm does not care about that much. What it cares about is the keyword density on each page and the uniqueness of the content. If the content is copied many times on different pages, then it is spamming. If the keyword density is not that high, then it does not mean that all pages are spammy.
I want to show you some data that clearly indicates that cloaking is not a good thing. Why? If other sites are cloaking, then cloaking sites will drop off the search results list very fast. And this will affect your rankings very severely.
Let’s look at one of the sites that use this tactic called “spyfu” and see what Google has done to them in the last year. Now you can look at the site to see precisely how they have done this. Google will make some bots come across this site and index it. That will then cause them to rank. But this is not what we are interested in here. What we are interested in is what Google has done to this site. And the answer is that they have lowered their rank by one position. Now, this is extremely low. You can see this by doing a site browser with the Google Toolbar. You will see that the site ranks at or near the bottom. But you can also look at the page rank. If you do a site browser with Google, you will notice the page rank is much lower. And you will see that this site is not on the first page of Google. This is one of the sites that use this tactic called “spyfu”. And how did they do?
- The site should have had its content unique to each page.
- They should have had only one title tag on each page, and the title tag should have had their chosen keywords in it.
- They should have had their content formatted for the search engine.
Many more tactics can be used, but the only thing that matters is that you have done something that you thought was relevant. You should say that you have done something with your content that your visitors will remember and be interested in. But these days, it is easy for you to get away with putting your keyword-rich content into a site and fooling Google into indexing the site. But it is a concise term victory. You have fooled Google for a bit, but in the end, you will be found out. So what you need to do is have a long-term strategy. That strategy should consist of many tactics such as creating relevant content, formatting your content properly, getting relevant links from relevant sites, get a lot of people to your site by creating a good site map, keep your site updated, having a good user interface and so on. But ultimately, you must have an exemplary user interface and have it indexed and ranked.
The bottom line is this. The more you learn about the search engine and how they rank your site, the more you should get your site indexed and ranked. This is simple. All you have to do is keep your site up to date, keep your content fresh and relevant and get a lot of backlinks.