URL forwarding-robot friendly?

URL forwarding & cloaking

[mthorpe]

Do robots recognize(approve of it)url forwarding as my web site is hosted with one company and my domain name is with another, so i get url forwarding from where my domain name is. Also, do robots recognize cloaking? I do this to my domain name so just my domain name is shown in the address bar and not the underlying link.

[DaveAtIFG]

Does anyone have any experiences to share?

In other words, *bump* :)

[darksat]

If it is meta refresh you will get penalised.
if it is frame based you are not doing to bad.
the best way is a 301 redirect (if you have the right setup)
Some robots can pick up cloaking by pretending to be a normal browser.
if you are going to cloak make sure you have an up to date IP list or a VERY VERY VERY advanced user string agent cloak.
You are taking a risk while cloaking.
Make sure the 2 sites are not 2 different as users can still view the google cache.
Cloaking is a lot of work.
If you dont know what you are doing, DONT
Its that simple.

[DaveAtIFG]

Some domain name registrars offer "domain name cloaking." I think darksat is talking about web page cloaking, a very different thing.

[mthorpe]

Some of my web sites are cloaked by the company where my domains are at. I don't do the cloaking. As for my url forwarding, i do that with a meta refresh tag. Do the search engines always penalize you when using meta refresh tags? What do they do to you?

[DaveAtIFG]

Very fast meta-refresh tags, 0-2 seconds, was a pretty lame trick that was popular years ago. People would include a fast meta-refresh on a high ranking doorway page to send visitors to the "real site" before they knew what happened.

I've used meta-refreshes with a 5-8 second delay for many years with no ill effects for legitimate pages, not doorways. Prominent doorways with fast redirects are very likely to get reported as spam by competitors..

What do they do to you?

They may award you some type of penalty (bury the page in their rankings) or an outright ban, it varies from SE to SE. I haven't seen any recent reports.

Added a little for clarity

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 8:21 pm (utc) on Aug. 11, 2004]

[mthorpe]

so if they were to ban (or penalize) your link, would they ban the rest of your links(that's listed on their search engine) attached to your account? say you have an account at a web hosting company like easyspace.com and you have a bunch of web pages linked to your account that are listed on their search engine ie: account.easyspace.com/me etc....if one gets penalized, do they all, that are linked to the same account?