What is domain masking?

Domain masking is where your domain name will show up in the address bar instead of your usual URL. Usually domain masking is used to hide long intrusive complicated addresses. Many times this is also the case for a company that has used the same URL for years and do not want to change for whatever reason.

Lets go over what exactly this means.

Domain masking or “pointer domains” is also like having a forwarding address at the post office. You have your mail coming to one address, and then have it redirected or forwarded to another entirely different address. The end result is this, the sender of the mail has one address, while the mail is redirected to another address, and your sender is not able to see the second final address but you received your mail all the same. This holds true for domain masking as well.

A perfect example of domain masking would be this: you have a blog at www.yourblog.blogplace.com. You want your viewers to be able to find you at www.blog.blogplace.com. You would then use www.blog.blogplace.com to be redirected to your masked domain name www.yourblog.blogplace.com. Your viewer is still seeing www.blog.blogplace.com as the URL, but is sent to www.yourblog.blogplace.com. The content is the same, the pages viewed is the same, the only difference is the ending URL.

Why would any one use domain masking? Usually it’s to help the viewers remember the URL by giving them a shorter version or if you are using a free hosting service that has more than your domain name listed in the URL.

Domain name masking has some minor drawbacks if you don’t understand what you are doing.

Using search engines for traffic is great, but when it comes to domain masking you need to be very careful of duplicate content being flagged by the search engine. Google is one of the top search engines that are utilized in today’s web browsing and sometimes will only index one URL if it has been flagged as duplicate content. What happens is that Google sees two different URL’s listed with the exact same content. Then the masked domain is sometimes flagged as duplicate content. The problem with this is it might not be the site you had in mind to be indexed because you don’t get a choice in what is flagged and what isn’t. Sometimes using 301 redirects are a better way to keep the stream going than using masked domains.

If all of this information sounds a little Greek to you, you might consider getting expert help from a domain name company or service. There are many reputable companies out there that know the policy on domain masking. Deciding if domain masking is the right thing for your website and content is the first step to take. Don’t get in over your head if you do not completely understand domain masking, reach out for help. There may be other alternative routes you can take.