Forwarding or masking

[techtimmy]

I've purchased some domain names via my Fasthosts account but I dont have any hosting with them.

I have my business site hosted elsewhere and i've made a landing page so i can forward all the domains regged at fasthosts to this single sales page about buying domains on my business site. (I know plenty of you do this as well)

I'm just wondering, in fasthosts I have 3 option when forwarding, a 301 forward, a 302 forward or domain masking.

I've been doing a 302 forward (temporarily moved) so far but i prefer the sound of masking: Fasthosts description is:

Masks the destination website's URL in the browser address bar and shows your domain name instead.
When website visitors enter your domain name in their browser, this will remain displayed even when the destination website is shown in the main browser window.
Because Domain Masking uses frames, you should enter a Title (displayed at the top of the web browser window). You can also provide Meta Tags to help Search Engine indexing.

For some reason i've got it in my head that the masking makes the name less desirable to end users as it gets searched by Google and filed as a crap site. Am i just trippin or is this true?

 

[VSC]

To be honest, if these are new domains with no promotion ever done, it's very unlikely that they'll be found in the search engines anyway - so it's a bit immaterial.

My preference is always to put some content on domain and link to it from a domain sales page. Ideally I'll get some unique articles, a bit of a design etc so they start to rank on G - so they gain more value.

You can get articles at low cost from the various forums, 2 or 3 is enough to get most doamins ranking.

Best,

Vic

 

[anthony]

...For some reason i've got it in my head that the masking makes the name less desirable to end users as it gets searched by Google and filed as a crap site. Am i just trippin or is this true?

Go ahead and frame it, Google just needs highlighting to its existance in some way, for example through your signature here. I've had no problem with this, they index very well. Just make sure the content is good, that's all.

It's an odd thing with Google though, that if you drop the name you're forwarding from at some time in the future, the web space it was forwarded to is still seen as valid by them. I had two domain names i dropped earlier this year (they didn't pay for themselves), but since then, the web space is indexed and still trickles in some Adsense revenue.