This week, we're taking a look at a new form of cloaking. Can search engines be cheated with this new method?

In the news: Yahoo integrates Del.ico.us in the results, users don't trust search results, Google's Wikipedia rival is not a high priority project and more.

In addition, IBP 10 is now ready to be tested!

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• The IBP 10 beta version is available - New!
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

Webmasters involved in rather shady search engine optimization methods invented a new form of cloaking. That new method has been called mosaic cloaking and it is an attempt to make cloaking less detectable.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to regular web surfers.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.

Search engines don't like cloaking because its purpose is to deceive search engines. If Google detects that a website uses cloaking, it will remove the website from the index.

What is new in mosaic cloaking?

While traditional cloaking served totally different content to search engines and human web surfers, the new cloaking method replaces only parts of the page.

For example, the blank space on a web page might be filled with keyword rich text when a search engine spider requests a page. The rest of the page remains unchanged.

Does this new cloaking method work?

It's likely that you can get short term results with this method because it's a relatively new method to which search engines might not have reacted yet.

However, we don't recommend cloaking to optimize your web pages. While you might get short-term results with cloaking, it is likely that your web site will be banned from search engines sooner or later.

Search engines know that these cloaking methods exist and they employ highly skilled engineers that try to detect spammy websites with algorithms. In addition, a competitor might manually report your website.

Google has made it very clear that these cloaking methods will get your website banned from Google's index if you use them. If you want lasting results, better use ethical search engine optimization methods to get your website to the top of Google's search results.

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Delicious integrated into Yahoo search results

"Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages. [...] What isn't clear is if Delicious results are impacting search rankings, or if Delicious data is simply being integrated into the existing rankings."

83% of SEO's don't yet report paid links

"After Google’s propaganda and the publicity behind the issue I was expecting more people to have reported paid links. The full results are below: No - 72%, Yes - 17%, Not yet but I probably will - 11%"

Search atheism on the rise

"Only 51% of people trust information provided by search engines, down from 62% in 2006. Google, as the most popular search engine in the United States, isn't trusted by nearly half (49%) of the people who use it, an interesting result."

• Blocking Opera users can also get you in trouble with Google search
  (Avoid robot blockers because they accidentally might block search engines.)
• Top 12 reasons to distrust Google.
• Double maps on Google.
• Google to host terabytes of open-source science data.
• EU continues to scrutinize Google-DoubleClick deal.
• The brains behind Google's primary logo.
• Yahoo, T-Mobile say sign mobile Internet ad deal.

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Note: If you have or buy the current IBP version, the new IBP version 10 will be a free update for you.

Click here to download the beta version.

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