Questions
+4
Does anyone know a way to mask URLs in an umbrella site?
We are moving to an umbrella site and found out that this will cause all our sites to have a url with the base site. For example our TV station is currently bgdailynews.com/wdnz instead of wdnz.com. That address will take you there but we would like the browser window to show wdnz.com. TownNews has told us they don't have a way to provide masking to accomplish this. Has anyone found a way to do it on their own?
Customer support service by UserEcho
If you use an Iframe tag, on wdnz.com to include bdailymews.com/wdnz you can do it. That is the only way I know of without server-level access.
Thanks we'll try!
@W. Rags. Would doing this affect SEO?
depends on the crawler. More than likely, it will.
It will depend on if the crawler knows what the target site is, and if they deduct value for such things.
As followup: After doing this the browser was saying the site was not secure. In trying to get that changed I was told "Townnews does not support domain masking nor iframe solutions. This relates to SEO and also how allowing iframes can let non customers take customer pages and literally display them as their own for ad revenue."
So we are reevaluating whether to do this. But, haven't heard of another way to solve the issue.
Interesting. If your "browser" is saying insecure then somewhere you have a "http://" instead of a "https://". That has nothing to do with Townnews.
As for the iframe, are you trying to wrap an entire page in the iframe, or just a "section" so that you can include information from elsewhere on your page?
I'm not very tech saavy & don't follow all of this completely. I simply sent your first quote to our tech guy and he did it. Afterward, GoDaddy said we needed to contact TownNews & have wdnz.com added to our SSL certificate for it not to show as insecure. To which TN responded "if you are wanting to pursue this route our systems team who handles the SSL Certificates said that because you are doing this from an iframe we would not be able to provide the SSL certificate. This is because in order to provide the certificate we would need DNS pointed at us." I asked if they knew another way that didn't involve the SSL certificate problem & the reply was "Townnews does not support domain masking nor iframe solutions. This relates to SEO and also how allowing iframes can let non customers take customer pages and literally display them as their own for ad revenue."
Based on the response to you passing this along to your tech guy, neither is he. Using an iframe like this:
(iframe src="https://cadillacnews.com")(/iframe) will create a secure (to the browser at least) content connection to the target site. Even if my URL is FredsDiner.org and I di that, it is still secure to the browser. In this case it has nothing to do with Godaddy, or Townnews.
HOWEVER
Townnews may do some sort of referrer checking at which point they may block access. That is a different issue though.
So... Just to clarify, your new domain is wdnz.com and you want to pull in content from TownNews (say wdnz.org) then you would use on the wdnz.com site (substituting the proper brackets):
(iframe src="https://wdnz.org")(/iframe)
Now, this is frowned upon, since Townnews is in business to host sites, the more appropriate method is to create a HTML block on your Townnews site (as used above wdzn.org), and put in the iframe code like this: (iframe src="wdzn.com")(/iframe) and host the main site at townnews.
Secure has nothing to do with DNS other that the Secure cert needs to match the content site information. The technology will work either way. Policy and Contracts is what will stand in your way.
FYI: I work for our paper, and an Internet Service Provider that does hosting. I deal with these things daily.