URL Masking (URL Cloaking)

URL Masking is a process by which your original URL is hidden by another URL. For example you have your homepage at http://yourhost.com/you (Original) and booked any URL Making service with your homepage set as http://yourname.com (Mask) then when you enter the Mask URL you will see the page at Original URL but the address bar will show the Mask URL. To make it easy lets take an example:

The website named szakaly.co.nr is a mask for the true URL domain1030180.sites.fasthosts.com/szakaly08 . So you could see, URL Mask are used to convert long URLs into short and easy ones.

So, how does URL Masking work? URL Masking is implemented using frames. How? An invisible frame (frame having border equal to zero) is used to cover your original page. Also, some text is given in the noframes tag for the the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and Search Engines since they could not interpret the frames tag.

For a better understanding of how URL masking works, take a look at the source of the website in the above example. The source starts with some meta tags into the head tag constituting the header information about the website. Following that, there is a frameset tag having the properties of border and framespacing set to zero. Then comes your original URL, embedded in the frame tag and the whole page is displayed by this tag only. Finally there comes noframes tag containing some text about the website for the old browsers and Search Engines discussed above.
noframes tag for the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and for Search Engines.

For a better understanding look at the source of the website in the above example. There you can see meta-tags embedded in the head tags which give header information about the website. It is followed by frameset tag which has properties of border and framespacing both set to zero. The original website url is then embedded in the frame src="" tag. At last there are noframes tag having some text for the old browsers and search engines.