What is DNS Masking?
To understand DNS masking, we must first understand DNS forwarding. DNS forwarding is the concept of creating multiple links that all lead back to your website. However, when doing this, it could result in someone clicking a link titled “coolcars.com” and bring them to a website titled “bestcars.com”. This is fixed with something called DNS masking. DNS masking is the concept of changing how viewers see domain names. What I mean by this, is that if you were to click on “coolcars.com”, you would still be brought to “bestcars.com”, but the domain name that you see would be “coolcars.com”, even though its the same website.
Some Pros and Cons of DNS Masking
Pros
- Creates a professional brand experience for your viewers
- Your domain is more likely to be recognized by search engines
Cons
- Search engines will detect multiple different domains with the same content, which is bad because it results in only one URL being indexed, and it might not be the domain that you want. If this happens, then it’s a big disadvantage
- Your users might distrust you because scammers often cloak URLs
Here are some other ways that URLs can be hidden. These are also some examples of how many scammers will try to get you to click links to their websites.
This is a link that leads to something not described in the link name
This is a button that acts as a link so you have no information on where it will take you
This is a link that takes you to its source when you hover your mouse over it
This link downloads a file when its clicked
