RealNames said:
Most every time I see a masked forwarded name the title (and other metatags) show up in the serach engines, meaning the url is indexed. If it is a keyword title and the search terms match the title and domain then the masked domain will appear at or near the top of Google, often in
#1 position.
Many search engines handle frames just fine. How they rank pages, or whether their policy will change tomorrow, who knows. I don't pretend to know anything about search engine optimization. The main page carries the title and optionally the metatags, so the spider should have no problem indexing those. If the content for the page is in a frame, meaning it is located at some other URL, then the spider will have to go fetch it before it can index it.
RealNames said:
As far as pages loading slow, that is not so judging by the 300,000 names buydomains.com had on masked forwarding. During the yrs they did that I recall hitting on them many times and they always loaded as fast as any other url did. I still see that normal loading time today with other firms using masked forwarding, even though BD now uses a much different sales/ppc method.
I'm not saying the technique doesn't work. In fact I use frames to load ppc results all the time (the main page is on my server, so I am not dependent on the "free redirect" server at a registrar. I like things simple, and recently when eNom started trying to convert users' url forwarding to cnames to reduce their server load, I was very glad I wasn't using it. The fact is that redirection and/or frames takes longer and is less reliable than a simple web page. Look at it this way. If I have
www.domain1.com and use masked forwarding at my registrar to forward it to
www.domain2.com, and that page has ppc results in a frame, before a surfer sees the ppc results, his browser has to 1) resolve the IP address for
www.domain1.com, 2) load the main page from the registrar's redirect server, 3) resolve the IP address of the frame URL,
www.domain2.com, 4) load that page from the web server where it is hosted, 5) resolve the URL of the ppc provider, and 6) load the ppc results. If all goes well, that happens quickly and the surfer isn't aware of all the places his browser has gone. But if any link in that chain breaks, no ppc revenue for you.
RealNames said:
Regarding being at the mercy of the servers, that is not so in my case as I have my own colocated dedicated server.
So you don't use masked forwarding as provided by your registrar (If you do, there is another web server involved in serving up the first page.)
RealNames said:
Not sure what this means "Clicking on a link within the page forwarded to does not generally change the address box of the browser, etc" ?
What I mean is, using the above example, the content at
www.domain2.com is hidden inside a frame, and the URL in the Address box says
http://www.domain1.com. If you click on a link to go to a different page, lets say /page2.html, the Address box generally still says
http://www.domain1.com, not the
http://www.domain1.com/page2.html you would expect if it wasn't hidden in a frame. Is that important? Probably not for a ppc parking page, but if you have a large site full of content the surfer is going to get confused about where he is in the site. There are ways around this, but they aren't so simple.
RealNames said:
P.S. To Methods and others. One thing you guys are not understanding is we do NOT want all the time and expense of creating hundreds or thousands of sites with duplicate content on a server to accomplish this. Just one site with lots of domains pointing to it but using their own url in the browser window. Thanks.
I hear that. I have one page that I use for 2000+ domains. I wouldn't think of using any method that required multiple copies of the page, or even manual configuration of forwarding or website host names.
Ricado said:
:-# sorry!
I do have no idea about how to let people find our the web sites if you don't want your domain names activated.
Me either. I don't know what the active/inactive thing is. An inactive domain name isn't going anywhere.
I think the availability of URL forwarding from a DNS control panel confuses the issue by hiding the fact that there is a web server somewhere serving up web pages for the domain name. It may be a very limited, special-purpose server designed just for forwarding, but it serves up html code on port 80, just like every other web server. Just because a domain name is set for forwarding this way doesn't mean it is inactive.