The reader's ethical alarms are supposed to be muted by the combination of an ethical fallacy, a non-ethical consideration and powerful rationalizations. The ends you have been seeking justify the means to achieve them (the fallacy), the product works (the non-ethical consideration) and lots of other people use it (two rationalizations in one: everybody does it, and I'll be at an unfair advantage if I don't do it too.)

So it is with the "cloaking device" peddled at "The Art of Cloaking," a website that sells software to maximize traffic on websites. How? "PHP Cloak tricks the search engine spiders into thinking your site consists of thousands of optimized pages, even if you only have a very small site, or no site at all! What you get: Traffic! With PHP Cloak, you can get more listings, more quickly, and with better rankings for targeted keywords."

The key ethics clue here is "tricked." Web site operators are always annoyed that it takes a long time to improve their status on search engines, with the busiest, most established sites getting the higher-ranked listings. They deserve those listings, because they get the most traffic. The cloaking device makes the search engines think there is more to your site than there really is, leading to higher rankings, more visibility, and more traffic—which will also help raise rankings and traffic.

It's cheating, plain and simple. The advocates of these devices will claim that the search engine methods are unfair, that this is just a game with the winner being the cleverest site promoter. But deception is deception, and deception is unethical. The fact that the sites using the cloaking software push themselves ahead of better, more popular sites that don't is not even part of the cloakers' thinking. "That's their problem," is the general reaction. "They can use the cloaking software; it's their choice not to." But when a party's unethical tactics puts ethical competitors at a disadvantage, only two results are possible, and neither one is good. The ethical competitor has to adopt the unethical tactics, or the ethical competitor is out-performed by the unethical competition. That's why cheating is contagious, and why, in all of its forms, it must be resisted.

"Star Trek" got it right. It was the Romulans who used cloaking devices on their ships, and they were the bad guys.