Let me first say that I don't consider myself a Black Hat SEO. We are using IP Cloaking on a couple sites where the home pages are not FLASH, but they are graphically intensive nevertheless. The content we are serving to Google using IP-Delivery is 95% the same as if you were a user looking at the page. We've just removed a lot of the graphics and done some minor changes to the layout to make it more bot/indexing friendly. In my opinion it would be best described as 'Grey Hat' use of IP Cloaking but it is most likely *technically* against Google's Webmaster Policies regarding cloaking. We don't use any other single techniques considered grey or black-hat.

We are using Beyond Engineering for our IP List. We've been using this on several sites for over 5 years without a problem. Possibly because the content and look of the page is very similar to the non-cloaked content, but also possibly because it is extremely difficult to detect IP Cloaking.

One might say, Google could spoof their IP address or use a third-party proxy. While that is technically possible, whatever IP address they used would simply just get added to the list. I'm sure the IP Delivery company that provides this list has at least tens of thousands of clients with hundreds of thousands of websites. If Google tried to pull a fast one, it would seem they would only catch a handful of websites that they hit before the list updated and the handful that failed to update quickly after the list was updated. I've also read an article that IP Spoofing is considered unethical and the potential bad PR Google would get (being a publicly owned company with stock values) for spoofing IP's is potentially not worth trying this sneaky route.

The only other reason I could see a site getting banned is if the search results indicated content that was so different than the actual content displayed, someone would send a complaint to Google and Google would have a human being verify the claim and manually ban the site. I'm sure sites get manually banned for all kinds of reasons all the time. A similar method would be if Google contracted with a third party with a large staff of people that manually reviewed suspected sites.

There is of course ethical uses for IP delivery such as delivery different content to different users depending on their region. We aren't doing that though. And again, that's not the subject of this thread.

So I'm curious for those that have first-hand knowledge of IP-based cloaking use, not opinions, not rumors, not theories, but actual experience or knowledge of others actual experience, what has the risk of getting banned been like and has it changed?

Why am I asking this question? I'm asking it because according to Matt Cutts Google was going to crack down on cloaking beginning Q1 2011. I have seen any evidence they have and am wondering if anyone else has seen evidence they have, specifically regarding IP-based cloaking, not the other much more easily detectable cloaking methods.

Personally, especially for sites using it in sort of a grey-hat, subtle way, delivering essentially very similar & good content, I think Google has better things to invest their resources in which is why I have no knowledge of anyone using IP-based cloaking getting banned (but then I don't know a lot of people doing hence - hence the reason for the post.)

As usual Matt Cunts is full of shit. If you're doing other spammy shit with linking or offering straight redirects then yes you will probably get banned eventually, but that doesn't mean you can't make good money in the mean time. If you're being tricky about it eg. offering multiple versions of the page to different IP ranges and user agents then it's much much more difficult to detect. Google actually recommend that you "streamline" your pages for different regions.