Does Google classify websites with both an index.htm and an index.html
in the website root directory as "cloaking"? If Google doesnt consider
this as "cloaking" can you supply more information than supplied now
by Google on the subject "cloaking" so we can be sure of avoiding
trouble?

index.html is never displayed to users as it jumps users to index.htm.
index.htm is how the client wants the page to be displayed to users.
index.html is written in a way that is more effective for search
engines to catalogue the site. index.html does not contain any
irrelevant or misleading data about the site. Does google consider
this to be cloaking?

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Request for Question Clarification by xemion-ga on 03 Sep 2002 10:07 PDT

How does the search engine find index.html and not index.htm?  If it
comes up for your visitors then it would come up for a robot.  Are you
using robots.text or?

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Clarification of Question by bestsite-ga on 03 Sep 2002 15:19 PDT

HI Xemion-ga
Dulcie is away today - she asked the question yesterday

In reply to your question "How does the search engine find index.html
and not index.htm?"

I thought that the robots look at index.html files in preference to
.htm if both were present in the root directory of the website BUT i
don't know and this is really what we want to know.

The questions we want definitively answered are:

Does Google consider that websites which have  both index.html and
index.htm files in their root directory are guilty of trying to
manipulate higher rankings?
Is this called "cloaking"?
How does Google rank websites  which have  both index.html and
index.htm files in their root directory?

Hi, 

Cloaking is a method of having one page for the public and another
page for the robots. PHP ( a language used to create websites
dynamically)for instance, can be setup to tell whether it is a browser
or a robot that is currently accessing the site. Using logic, one page
could be shown to the robot and another page to real browsers. A
legitimate reason for doing such a thing would be :

  You have a website that is basically Flash in design. Having
  this site, you know that none of your hyper links to other 
  sites, or your text can be indexed by the robots, hence you
  make another page in code, that is all text and basic HTML, 
  which doesn't look as good, but gets indexed very well. 

Google says flat out, don't cloak. They want to have a real version of
your website available if someone searches for it, and many companies
in the past have used this method to "plush" up a site with keywords,
in an effort to get a higher listing. If you do use this method, you
risk a lower page rank or being removed from the index completely.

There are several other methods of cloaking, including IP forwarding,
but they all boil down to the same thing, hiding true content from
robots and showing robots other content.

As for your website, I would find out from the ISP what the default
page really is, index.htm or index.html and only use that page,
getting rid of the other. Or, you can make a robots.txt file (should
have one of these anyway) that tells the robot to ignore the
index.html file, and not to index it at all. This will  keep you from
being looked at as a "cloaker".

Comments on Cloaking from Google Under the Scope
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm#item134

PHP
http://www.php.net

Google Do's and Don'ts page
://www.google.com/webmasters/dos.html

Thanks, 

webadept-ga

Thank you for a very clear and explicit answer.  We really appreciate
this Google service - it is a great help to have reliable advice.

I assumed it doesn't like the redirection rather then the file
extension of .htm or .html (but that's my guess)