Domain "cloaking" - possibilities except iframe concept?

[bbanelli]

Greetings to all,

I have a client on my VPS that wishes to redirect his hosted domain to Google Sites, however, they wish to retain www.domain.com for their visitors in browsers URL bar.

As far as I am aware, this can be done with simple usage of iframes, but is there another technique that can be done via DNS manager in VPS to do the same thing? Redirections (301, 302) work, but then URL bar says site.google.com/foobar instead of www.domain.com

TIA!

Bruno

 

[phpAddict]

GoDaddy offers Forwarding in the domain's settings. It depends on your registrar whether or not they have such a thing, but it allows your domain to remain in the address bar and will allow full navigation of the site without the domain name changing. However this will affect any bookmarks since domain remains unchanged wherever you navigate on the site. Also, if you have SSL anywhere browsers are beginning to warn the user that it's unsafe due to possible spoofing. If that's a problem then a full size iframe/div is your only option as far as I know. But, why go from a true website to a free space website? Won't that affect search engine ranking? IMHO any way you accomplish this their ranking is going down.

 

[KH-Jonathan]

Sounds like what you need is a CNAME record.

 

[phpAddict]

Can you specify a domain and a path in a cname record? I always thought it was only domain to domain.

 

[KH-Jonathan]

It's domain only, but the path is relative.

Given the scenario CNAME cname.domain.com pointing to my.domain.cover.up:

cname.domain.com/path1 = my.domain.cover.up/path1

You could not make cname.domain.com = my.domain.cover.up/path1 though.

EDIT - root domain cannot be a CNAME, it must be a "sub" domain so I adjusted cname.com to cname.domain.com in this example.

 

[phpAddict]

I suppose the purpose of that forwarding feature I use is to get around that limitation. Sounds like cname is a better option when possible.

Any affects on ranking? I imagine crawlers are able to identify that being in use, correct?

The forwarding feature I use has just recently been triggering warnings in browsers when using https, think a cname would too?

 

[KH-Jonathan]

I'm not aware of any effects on rankings for using CNAME records. www after all, is generally a CNAME record to the A record "domain.com" in "www.domain.com" for example.