Is redirecting dev sites seen as bad cloacking?

Local server gives 301s to Google for online server.

[killroy]

I run a local apache server for all my development work.

Some my online sites are
-domain1.com
-domain2.com
and so on, and i have a local server dev_domain.com. All my local domain sites are
-domain1.dev_domain.com
-domain2.dev_domain.com
and so on.

Now, I "cloak" for google so if google comes to domain1.dev_domain.com it gets 301 redirected to domain1.com. This is to prevent gettign my dvelopment pages accidentall indexed because htey would be doplicats of the real domains.

Recently I noticed my local site domain1.dev_domain.com to show PR6 like my online site. If I type domain1.dev_domain.com into google it gives me the result for domain1.com.

I supose this is the normal behaviour. Are there any bad side effects I should be aware of? Would it be better to give google just 404s?

SN

[hakre]

if these pages simply shouldn't been indexed why just don't you prevent this by using robots.txt and/or meta-tags?

[Dave_Hawley]

as "Cloaked Page" is an option here: [google.com...] I would say it is seen as bad.

Dave

[NickCoons]

killroy,

<I supose this is the normal behaviour.>

Yes.. a 301 redirect is a permanent move. In my experience, this basically tells Google that "old page = new page." Once Google has processed this, it seems to combine the two.

As far as Google is concerned, you have two domains pointing to the same content, so it has determined that the two sites are identical.. because that's what it sees when it crawls them.