Confused about cloaking, webforwarding and getting on Google

Cloaking, web forwarding and Google

[Here 2 Learn]

What is the difference, if any between web forwarding with cloaking; and the cloaking thats about serving different pages to spiders v. web visitors? We don't want to fall foul of the rules so please consider the following set up and tell me if we are.

We own a series of domain names; OurDomainName.co.uk, .com and also .net. (And some related derivatives of our name.) Our web pages are hosted on the web developers server and our domain names are held by 3 separate companies (historical reasons). Our MAIN name - "OurDomainName.co.uk" is with a big hosting co. They are in the process of updating our A records; and having them point at the new IP address of our website. Someone at this company has said that this is NOT cloaking and has no impact on SE ranking. Is this true?

The other two companies will be web forwarding our domain names to the new IP address, with what they've called cloaking / frame-forwarding. Is this going to cause a problem with the likes of Google?

Also should Google and other spiders find our web pages at this IP address: What URL will be returned in the search results? E.g. will it be the .co.uk, .net or .com address, or god forbid simply the IP address? We only want the .co.uk to be returned in the results. The other names; particularly the derivatives; are not advertised and are mainly there to help people find us should they use the wrong address.

Also, one of our directors has an unusual name and is known in our industry. He wants to have his name in the Meta Tag, but not to appear on any of the web pages. Will doing this stop us from being listed on Google?

Help would be appreciated, we are somewhat new to this game and don’t have the big budget that SE optimisers are asking, also we are scared that they might use methods that will get us black listed.

regrds

[WebGuerrilla]

Hi Here_2_Learn,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld

[/i]The other two companies will be web forwarding our domain names to the new IP address, with what they've called cloaking / frame-forwarding.[/i]

The idea behind using IP delivery for forwarding is to be able to preserve content listed at an old domain, while working on getting a new domain indexed and ranked.

Fo3 example, if you had a site that has been around for awhile and you find yourself in a situation where you need to move to a new domain and the whole structure of your site must be changed, using IP delivery can dramataically reduce the potential of getting dropped.

When you detect the IP of a bot, you allow it to come in and continue to crawl theold site just as it always has. When you detect that the visitor is a human, you serve them a page that contains the redirect to the new location.

Once that is all set up, you begin the process of getting external links changed. That will bring Googlebot to the new site and get it crawled. After the new location is indexed and ranking well, you then remove the cloaking and begin giving spiders the same 301 redirect that human visitors.

Variations of this process are quite common. With that said, I'd be very careful with how you go about it. Anytime you cross over to the dark side of IP detection, you can easily get yourself into trouble.

The key is to remove it as soon as possible, so you don't get into a situation where you like you intentionally got multiple domains indexed in order to gain additional rankings. That would certainly be frowned upon.

[Here 2 Learn]

Thanks for your reply, WebGuerilla,

If I follow you correctly, you are saying that if we have multiple domain names pointing at the same IP address and content we will incur the wrath of God (sorry I mean google :)). Will this happen even if we only market our MAIN domain name and only encourage links to this ONE domain? If we do use 301 redirect – is it seamless? i.e. will it re-direct human visitors to our main domain automatically or will it have one of those rather untidy – “the site you have contacted has moved …. If you don’t go automatically click here” messages? I would be happy enough to have the true address show in the address bar, as in what happens when you type in www.google.net; it takes you seamlessly to www.google.com this would do for me, if it were to be our MAIN domain address in the address bar, but I don’t know what I should be asking of our various hosting companies to achieve this.

Your help again would be appreciated, regrds

[WebGuerrilla]

Yes, the 301 permanent redirect is seamless. Visitors are automatically forwarded to the new url. At the same time, spides are notified that the URL has been permantly moved to a new location.
The header sent by the server will look something like:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 16:06:03 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.6a
Location: http://www.newdomain.com/index.html
Connection: close

That will send both browsers and bots to the new location. And that will prevent your content from being crawled multiple times from different domains.

As far as relying on simply not promoting the other domains, I wouldn't do it. It only takes one person to put up a link somewhere on the web. You're better off making sure it only gets crawled under one domain.

[Here 2 Learn]

Thank you WebGuerrilla, for all your help.

regrds :)