What, exactly, is "Domain Cloaking"?

[Bobbynew]

I may be violating a Google rule.

I have two domain names that point to the same site. The reason I did this are:

1) One domain name withe keywords in the title for the search engines and websites (long hard to type name).

2) A much shorter name for print ads.

I really hope I didn't shoot myself in the foot.

[VDHG]

Originally Posted by Bobbynew

I may be violating a Google rule.
I have two domain names that point to the same site. The reason I did this are:
1) One domain name withe keywords in the title for the search engines and websites (long hard to type name).
2) A much shorter name for print ads.
I really hope I didn't shoot myself in the foot.

Google does frown upon it, but I did it when I had sites that needed multiple domains so that it would be more user friendly.

However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it 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 removal from our index.

[Ang3r_D4nger]

As VDHG said, Google frowns upon it and sometimes takes action. But most of the sites that I have seen that do this have never had any problems. Now on the other hand if you have a site that gets xxx,xxx,xxx hits a day; then they might actually look at your site.

Just be careful and not do too many and I don't THINK Google will abolish you from their indexing.

Go with your gut feeling on this,
Ang3r_D4nger