Domain masking - Do SE pick up page source?

[taffie]

Do search engines pick up the page source for a masked domain name or is it better to re-direct? And also if you mask an affiliate link, do you still get commisions due to you or the tracking affiliate ID is lost?

Thanks for any help.

[Hud]

Google analyzes the source code. So you won't be able to fake google this way.
Redirecting to affiliate links is a common practice - meaning it is ok if done correct. Since your affiliate link with your tracking link is the target of the redirect, it does not get lost:
yourmaskedaffiliatelink->redirects to->your real affiliate link->redirects to->affiliate money site

[taffie]

Hud thanks for responding butit was the masking bit I am most interested in and by the way I am not doing it to fake search engines as such, what I am trying to achieve is to include my keyword in my url, at the same time maintaining the source code of my original program link. My programme alows for adding meta tags and title, but because we have different landing pages, they sort of come with a sub directory already which I kind of want to keep clean and short.

Sounds kind of winded but I hope you got the idea huh?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by taffie

Hud thanks for responding butit was the masking bit I am most interested in and by the way I am not doing it to fake search engines as such, what I am trying to achieve is to include my keyword in my url, at the same time maintaining the source code of my original program link. My programme alows for adding meta tags and title, but because we have different landing pages, they sort of come with a sub directory already which I kind of want to keep clean and short.

Sounds kind of winded but I hope you got the idea huh?

Hi taffie,

Search engines will credit all PR benefit to the URL that is being masked, none to the masked domain.

My advice would be to modify your source code to utilize clean URLs with the keywords as directory, file or sub-domain names. Use server-side scripting like Mod Rewrite or similar technology.