Google will look more at cloaking in 2011

[~CReed]

Matt Cutts made a small mention on Twitter that Google will look more at cloaking in 2011; especially those instances that are primarily for the search engines' benefit rather than for the users:

http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/19152836789014528

Google will more at cloaking in Q1 2011. Not just page content matters; avoid different headers/redirects to Googlebot instead of users.

http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/19155888908537857

In earlier tweet, "Google will more at cloaking"? Yeah, read that as "Google will look more at cloaking" instead. Wish I could edit tweets.

Do you have anything to worry about?

[Mick M]

I'm guessing that affiliate redirects could be on their list.. 302 and 301 hops that are being abused by MLM types.

But I could be way off.

[f1seo]

One of my personal sites got nailed (dropped by 600 positions) for link cloaking to affiliates. It took me a lot of grovelling to Google and 6 months of waiting for it to re-establish its original rankings.

Thought I'd lost it for some time and was almost to the point of scrubbing it and starting again with a new domain name and hosting. But eventually it's back.

Would never cloak any links ever again. Lesson learned.