Most domain registrars offer a free feature called "forwarding" or "framing" or "masking". At first blush, it seems like a quick and easy way to setup a custom domain that displays your content. You don't have to do anything on ActiveRain, you get a cool domain that shows your blog, and everyone wins. Maybe. Let's take a closer look:
<html> <head><title>http://www.jhahnactiverainblog.com</title></head> <body> <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0"> <frame src="http://activerain.com/blogs/jhahn" frameborder="0" /> <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> </frameset> </body> </html>
(Example HTML code to embed my gorgeous blog in a frame on the fictitious www.jhahnactiverainblog.com)
How does this feature work? It starts with your domain registrar hosting a small html file containing a snippet similar to what you see above. This method of embedding a "page within a page" carries no SEO benefits and could, at worst, hurt your standing with search engines.
Strike One: If you look carefully and know some basic HTML, you'll notice that your domain registrar chooses the title of this page. Instead of your carefully crafted blog title, complete with relevant keywords, you're stuck with a bland URL.
Strike Two: When your content exists within a frame, you lose the powerful links that we so carefully craft on your behalf. For example, you can find this blog post at http://activerain.com/blogsview/901499/The-Great-Frame-Up-or-How-I-Learned-to-Stop-Worrying-and-Trust-ActiveRain. The link is rich with keywords that help boost your content to the top of search results. When you're "framing" content, this benefit is completely lost.
Strike Three: Search engines hate frames. They're a bygone technology from an era long since passed. Most "crawlers" can't (or won't) traverse frames. In my example, Google will not assign any value or PageRank to the domain www.jhahnactiverainblog.com because it has no real content — it just points to ActiveRain!
Strike Four: Tangentially, "framing" content on ActiveRain creates a security problem for our users. Imagine: a member visits my example site at www.jhahnactiverainblog.com. When they click on the login link, they don't see the familiar https://activerain.com/login URL and security padlock — they see my custom domain name. With the proliferation of "phishing" attacks and other online "confidence games", our priority is to keep ActiveRain a safe haven for our users.
Write without reservation and continue sharing your knowledge with the world — we'll take care of the arcane SEO bits.
