It is often said that people who risk money by buying a stock deserve the dividends they get by the risk they taking buying the stock. This is kind of tautological within the economic system however. The economic system consists of corporations producing commodities (PCs, bread, a colocation rack) and exchanging them for other commodities - a few decades ago money backed by gold, nowadays money which is theoretically worth something because one can pay taxes with it. Corporations often produce commodities which no one wants, which is the main risk of capital investment, it's a loss. Virtually everyone recognizes this as true, from former GE CEO Jack Welch to socialists like Paul Sweezy. Thus, the economic system commits the error of misplacing resources. This error produces capital risk, and this capital risk is the common explanation of why people deserve dividends from capital investment, instead of, say, the workers at the corporation who created that wealth.

As far as the US economy, productivity was extremely poor throughout the 1930's, then from the mid 1940's to the mid 1960's were 20 years of enormous productivity. It began slowing down in the mid 1960's, and by the early 1970's everyone realized there was an enormous problem. Nixon went off the gold standard, imposed wage and price controls, and dismantled the Bretton Woods system. Productivity has been pretty poor since the mid-1960s, there have been arguments of whether it had a decent bump in the late 1990s or not. The late 1990s bump is obviously from the Internet, an R&D project the US government poured billions of dollars into from the 1960s until the mid 1990s, it was a state project (DARPAnet/NSFnet) handed over the corporations when it had been developed after 25 years of taxpayer funding. Anyhow, this long slowdown in economic productivity in the US has resulted in the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US being below what it was 30 years before. Asia seems to be the only area with decent productivity growth in thw world, but that creates another problem of who is going to buy all of the commodities China is pumping out since the market is already saturated.

a) You charge only for relevant traffic - if it is a blue widget site - you only charge for searches which directly relate to blue widgets.

b) You only charge for unique visitors for a search term from a search engine in a 24 hour period - so if IP 123.456.789 comes from Google with a referral string of 'cheap blue widgets' 3 times in a 24 hour period - I would only charge for the first referral.

c) I put up a new site which belongs to me - I am selling traffic to the client - but as long as they continue to pay me at the agreed rate - I may not sell the traffic to anyone else - nor do the same deal for a competitor. I only charge for traffic via this site - any traffic they get going directly to their own site is not charged for. This way there is no confusion as to who is getting them the increase in traffic.

d) Price per click is determined by selecting 50 key phrases which are competitive in a market and working out the average charge on Overture - I then often halve that rate to make us attractive. As an example, I deal in the 'data recovery services' arena - where terms go for exorbitant rates on Overture - but I charge my client a fraction of these.

e) Client has to place a deposit which is fully attributable against clicks but also covers our set up costs.

It is a model which works well both for the SEO and the client - particularly in competitive markets.

Google flat out does not allow cloaking. Do it, and if they catch you, you could find yourself thrown out. That doesn't mean they'll catch you, but they have the most unambiguous policy of any of the crawlers. Having said this, there are the odd rumors that they've allowed the occasional special case for a few selected web sites. I've not yet been able to confirm this.

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The rest -- Inktomi, FAST, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista -- do allow cloaking. All of them. This is because they all have "trusted feed" programs where XML content can be fed directly into the search engine.

In an XML feed, you don't send the crawler a page. Instead, you send it something you can envision like a spreadsheet:

URL Title Meta Description Body
http//page1.html Women's Shoes Best women's shoes on t... We have
http//page2.html Men's Shoes Best men's shoes on the... We have
http//page3.html Sport Shoes Best sport shoes on the... We have

Each page has different elements sent to the search engine that get stored in its index. Title tags, description tags, body copy, whatever is allowed, you can set up. The "real" page can be completely different -- indeed, it will be, because a real page would have a ton of surrounding HTML code.

Having said this, all the other crawlers will universally say that the content of the XML feed should be representative of the page the user will see. The page that says it is about women's shoes better be about women's shoes, and so on.

So XML cloaking is tolerated. After that, I think it is generally true that cloaking done by those in CPC-based paid inclusion programs get the next level of acceptance, then those in flat-fee paid inclusio programs a little less. Finally, those who are cloaking without paying any fee are most likely to find themselves pulled because cloaking was seen as a "spam" violation.

It's important to stress that the more the cloaked page deviates from the "real" page, the more likely you are to face problems -- and while paying gets you more tolerance, it is not a get out of jail free card to do whatever you want.

Overall, cloaking does not automatically equal spam (except at Google). Paid programs allow forms of search engine-approved cloaking. If in doubt, explain why you need to employ cloaking and get clarification from the company selling you inclusion. If you have a good reason, you'll probably be able to do it.