Hello all, I am pretty sure this is not possible, but wanted to make absolutely sure. I know that you can purchase a URL like “myurl.com” and point it at a directory and mask it. But I got a request from upper management asking whether or not you could include a directory in the masked URL like having “myurl.com/directory” point to “myhost.com/directory/file.html.” Is this done or even able to be done?
To the best of my knowledge, it’s not possible. You could actually host “myurl.com/directory” and make that page a 100% width and 100% height iframe which holds the content you’re trying to display, but that’s deceitful so I would advise against it.
Thanks, that’s pretty much what I thought. I’d have to have frames on a page which limits SEO content to meta tags. No bueno.
Well masking the URL with an A record will hork your SEO as well. Neither are a good solution.
Yeah, I am convincing them to just purchase an alternative URL and host it rather than use masking.
If you own a domain and have control over it, you can redirect any filepath/name to any other URL on any domain.
What exactly is it that you’re trying to achieve?
Well it’s complicated but my company is a network that owns little companies of the same type, laboratories. The lab websites are all hosted in the directory of the network main website. So, the network has their global brand, and a high end brand that one of the labs owns. They want that subbrand to scale to the other labs eventually. The URL they want is not available, so the suggestion was www.labname.com/subbrand as a masked URL which could be hosted on www.network.com/theirlabs/labname, that way the sub brand name can be used while hosting it on the other directory. I think it would be better to come up with variation on the URL though. The only way I can think to do the masking would be the iframe way which is no good.
Uhh…subdomains? subbrand.mainbrand.tld
Yeah, but the only problem is that the labs are all using masked URLs already, unfortunately. So subbrand.mainbrand.com doesn’t work, at least I don’t think so. Can you add subdomains to a masked URL, like subbrand.maskedurl.com?
You need to control the DNS of the domain to setup a subdomain. So if you wanted to create subbrand.maskedurl.com you need to be able to manage maskedurl.com.