cloaking 101?

is it or isn't it?

[thatmtnman]

I've been fortunate to get 4 dot com urls each of which relates to a different interest area of my site. I run my site on virtual host which will only give me one ip. So I created a dedicated page for each of the urls, and a nav bar which uses the urls as nav elements. Now I found out my host has something nifty in its bag of tricks that will create a situation where a user will be redirected automatically to a page depending on what url he typed in the browser in the first place.

Is this 'cloaking' or some other kind of 'offense'?

Secondly, if I redo the meta tags for each of those url based pages (but on the same ip number) will that help me at all in search engine results?

thanks!

[Dreamquick]

That sounds like a simple redirect based on the source URL which shouldn't be penalised as there is nothing inherently wrong or misleading about the basic premise.

As long as you treat search engines and users exactly the same on those "redirect" domains then you should be fine - cloaking would imply that you are showing one thing to users and another thing to the search engines.

Meta-tags - aside from "description" (for those few SEs/places that still use it) the remaining meta-tags they are mostly a waste a bandwidth unless you really / require them for internal use.

Most decent search engine results rely on a mix of on-page content and off-page factors (for example Google's PR, incoming links + link-text) so tweaking meta-tags will have zero effect since they are mostly ignored due to the ease they can be used to insert spam.

- Tony