: Does URL masking effect SEO? Does "URL masking" effect SEO? For example: masking "www.domain.com/p/page.html" to subdomain.domain.com *Means everyone who visits "subdomain.domain.com", see "www.domain.com/p/page.html"

@Jamie184

The masking is done with frameset


Using a frame, often called "framed forwarding" for masking the real URL is generally bad for SEO and delivers a bad user experience.

The URL inside the frame is not hidden from search engines (or users). There are essentially two separate pages/URLs and both can be indexed. The only page with content is the inner/framed page, so this will likely be the page that will be returned in search results (if it is indexed).


I have removed the original page "www.domain.com/p/page.html" from google index to avoid duplicate.


You can't remove the inner/framed page from the index without removing the actual content from the index. Without the content being indexed then you are obviously not going to rank for anything on that page. The outer "frameset" is simply a container, by itself it has no content.

There is no "duplicate". They are two different URLs. One simply contains the other in a frame.

When the user navigates your site the URL in the address bar does not change (as you suggest) and they are unable to bookmark individual pages. This can be confusing and frustrating for users.


<frame src="www.domain.com/p/page.html"



Incidentally, without the scheme (eg. ) on the URL this is likely to break in most browsers (historically this would have only worked in IE).

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@Murphy175

Redirects effect SEO because they slow down response time.

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