What is URL masking?
Normally, after your shortURL.com forwards to your real URL, your real URL is then shown in the browser’s address bar. Turning on URL masking, allows you to keep your shortURL in the address bar by using a hidden frame trick. This frame is invisible to the user. Then, if visitors bookmark your site, they bookmark your shortURL, and search engines will link to your shortURL as well. 95% of our users choose to use this feature. What is Frame Kill? Frame Kill forces your site to pop out of any frames it may be loading in. For example if another website links to you and opens your site inside their frame. How does this work? If you have URL masking turned on, we insert JavaScript code into the hidden frame. If URL masking is off, we create an invisible and temporary page loading the JavaScript to first pop out your site then use HTML to forward the user. This process is invisible to the user, other than seeing your site pop out of a frame. Tell me more about shortURL traffic reports. With
The URL is the physical location of your site, and URL Masking is a way of utilising the free web space provided by your ISP without revealing to the user where your site is hosted. As well as looking more professional, it means if you need to move your site to a different host, the move will be transparent to the user. 1&1 include URL masking free of charge (which is one of the reasons we use them!).
