Domain Forwarding & Cloaking W.r.t. Search Engine

[JohnC]

Hi Folks.

 

Appreciate any feedback on the following items:

 

1) How do serach engine spiders feel about domain forwarding (cloaked and otherwise)?

 

2) Any wisdom on whether and how it will effect your listing with the major engines?

 

For example, yoursite.com is registered and hosted at TCH (yoursite.com/index.html). You buy a couple of other domains (say, each representing a different product sold at yoursite.com) and want to point to subdomains or a specific pages within the yoursite.com hosted account.

 

Given this scenario, does it matter (from search engine listing point-of-view) if each of these new domains were cloaked and forwarded, or not cloaked?

 

Furthermore, would the ranking be effected in any way if the additional domains were hosted as 'themselves' rather than being forwarded to pages at an existing site?

 

And finally, does multiple redirection have any effect on the listing - e.g. newdomain.com forwarded to a DNS service such as zoneedit from the registrar, then further forwarded through zoneedit to the sub-page or domain within the main site?

 

Hope its not too confusing...appreciate any feedback...

 

Thanks

 

John

[SEO]

John:

 

For example, yoursite.com is registered and hosted at TCH (yoursite.com/index.html). You buy a couple of other domains (say, each representing a different product sold at yoursite.com) and want to point to subdomains or a specific pages within the yoursite.com hosted account.

This 'strategy' would be asking for trouble.

 

Furthermore, would the ranking be effected in any way if the additional domains were hosted as 'themselves' rather than being forwarded to pages at an existing site?

 

If 'as "themselves"' you mean separate distinct content, then they would be viewed, indexed and ranked as separate entities. You have to be careful here though with avoiding the filter for duplicate content.

 

And finally, does multiple redirection have any effect on the listing - e.g. newdomain.com forwarded to a DNS service such as zoneedit from the registrar, then further forwarded through zoneedit to the sub-page or domain within the main site?

 

If the redirect is a permanent 301 redirect, you are fine.

 

Good luck

[JohnC]

Hi Scott

 

Thanks for the reply. A couple follow-ups:

 

Do you know if the search spiders have a preference in regard to 'cloaking'? If a domain is forwarded as 'cloaked' vs regular forwarding, does this have any implication by way of SEO?

 

I suppose when you say 'dangerous' you are worried about intent to mislead - which was not how the question was intended.

 

For example, if I have a hard to remember domain name that is hosted, then want to create a "support" page - it would make sense to acquire an easy to remember domain name and forward it to the support page at the existing hosted domain. My question was in this context, and from SEO point of view:

 

1) would it be better/worse to use "cloaked" forwarding, or would that not make any difference

 

2) if cloaking is used, which meta tags will be used during spidering - the ones contained in the target page, or the ones specified at the forwarding end...

 

 

Thanks again

 

John

[TCH-Rob]

From Googls about "My web pages used to be listed and now they aren't."

 

Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

 

Good enough for me not to cloak.

[SEO]

Sorry John... thought I answered your question.

 

From Googles own mouth:

 

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

For example, if I have a hard to remember domain name that is hosted, then want to create a "support" page - it would make sense to acquire an easy to remember domain name and forward it to the support page at the existing hosted domain.

 

As I alluded to, my advice would be to 'acquire an easy to remember domain name' and redirect the 'hard to remember domain name'.

[SEO]

Oh, you beat me to the punch Mr. Rob...

 

... nice to see how consistent these TCH folks are

[TCH-Rob]