Is using “framing”, “masking” or “URL forwarding” a problem?
Posted by John Mueller on April 7th, 2007
Many domain registrars have a simple way of allowing you to use your domain name to point to your content on some other web-server / domain. This is often done to save costs - you can usually activate this service free of charge and use it to point to content on a free web-hoster. There are several ways of doing this and the registrars sometimes call it by different names.
The problem is always the same: as long as you do not have your content hosted on your domain name, it will not be associated with your domain name.
It does not matter if you use a clean 301 or 302 server-side redirect or if you use a full page frame (sometimes called “masking”). Technically your content is being hosted elsewhere.
This will cause two things to happen:
- You will not be able to verify your domain name through Google’s Webmaster Central (nor will you be able to submit a sitemap file)
- Your content will not be associated with your domain name and will not be indexed with that name; most likely nothing will be indexed with your domain name
By not having your content associated with your domain name, you are going to run into a problem: if you should ever decide to move to a different hoster or if that hoster decides to not host sites anymore (or not for free, at least) then all the value that your site will have gained until then will be lost. All the links to your content will be worthless if you do not have control over that web-server / domain name.
By hosting the content with your own domain name, you are independent and can move servers as much as you desire. By hosting on your own domain name, any value that you build will remain your value for as long as you have control of that domain name.
If you want to keep your website for more than just a short time, it makes a lot of sense to spend the little bit more to get it hosted on your own domain.