What Is Masked Domain Forwarding?
Masked domain forwarding is useful when you want to conceal the true Internet address of your website content. For example, your site may be hosted on a free hosting service or blogging service such as WordPress.com and you do not want your readers to know it. However, domain masking has disadvantages for both the site owner and end user. Understand how it works before you decide whether or not to use it.
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Description
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Domain forwarding is redirecting requests for an Internet domain such as "your-domain.xxx" to another domain. Ordinarily, the user's Web browser will show the new address instead of the original once it arrives at the destination site. For example, if the domain "12345.xxx" redirects to "abcxyz.xxx," the browser will reflect this change. However with masked domain forwarding, you can redirect a domain to another website without changing the address shown. To visitors, this creates the impression that they are still on the original domain; they never see the real address of the website they browse.
How It Works
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You can set up masked domain forwarding with your domain registrar. You will need to fill out a form where you specify the destination address and perhaps relevant keywords for the site. Once masked forwarding is activated for your domain, the registrar will create a blank home page for the domain. The home page will contain an invisible frame that leads to the destination website. A visitor to your site will see the content of the target site yet the domain name and page title will be that of the original domain.
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Example
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An example of a masked domain forwarding code is shown below. The code is set so that the frame displaying the target address takes up the whole screen. The frames have no borders to make them invisible to the human eye.
<html><head><title>My Website</title></head>
<frameset border="0" rows="100%,*" cols="100%" frameborder="no">
<frame name="TopFrame" scrolling="yes" noresize src="url">
<frame name="BottomFrame" scrolling="no" noresize><noframes></noframes></frameset></html>
Disadvantages
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Masked forwarding has potential risks for the website owner. One disadvantage that can alienate visitors is that it is impossible to bookmark specific pages in a masked domain. Another, perhaps more serious risk is that search engines may get the impression that the two domains share duplicate content. Google and other search engines may prefer to index only one or the other site or even penalize them by crawling them infrequently.
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References
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