'blind linked' WTF -do they mean re-direct?

pencil

A client other web development company (in US) has asked for a domain (say: www.newdomain.com) to be 'blind linked' to www.olddomain.com/folder/ .

Do you think they mean just put a redirect page up or point the nameservers of the new domain to a existing folder on the old site?

I'm problem is I haven't heard of 'blind linking'!

Opinions?

& thanks in advance!

andersde10

Never heard of that before but why not just ask them what they mean?

LoLth

just a guess but could they mean..

when the user types in www.newdomain.com it autoatically shows the content in www.olddomain.com/folder but the address bar etc still shows them as being at the root of the new domain. No re-direct page just a straight mapping to the chosen location?

as I said, off top of my head.

mm2

"blind linking" is used in a couple of contexts:

• Where the status bar provides no / misleading information on the destination of the link. Typically hiding the fact a link is an "off site" link. Some affiliate schemes forbid the use of "blind linking" in this sense.
• The term also refers to links on special "reciprocrical links" pages of websites which are not linked to from the associated parent website and are there for not highly visible to the user or search engines.
• Sometimes the link can be totally disguised - so you think you're going to a legitimate site and end up at another one - this can be achieved by linking to - and registering a domain using non-english character sets, typically cyrillic / russian . See this article for more.

However in this context I'd suggest what was being requested was what's generally termed "cloaking" : when the web address of a web site is hidden from viewers in their browser window. For example your user would type in www.newdomain.com and be automatically redirected to your web site www.olddomain.com/folder/ yet continue to see www.newdomain.com in the location bar as they browsed.

Seth Brundle

I have done this a few times and when a visitor wants to go to a clients (small) site they are in effect brought to a page on my hosting a/c. However, the domain was purchased through godaddy who allow cloaking of the domain by utilising a single frame which contains the index page of the folder on my site.
To get around the inability of pages being bookmarked I use a small bit of server side scripting which includes the relevant file based on a querystring. It works fine!

mneylon

You should be able to do it in Apache's config by adding a vhost with the new domains root pointing to the directory you want.