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Diagnosing Problems With Custom Domains - Case Study #9

One of the many ways of including one web site (blog) inside another web site (blog) is by using an IFrame. The host web site contains a frame, and the source of the frame is the other web site. And you can do that as well in what looks like a custom domain, but won't give you the same results.

<frameset rows="100%">
<frame title="http://www.mydomain.com" src="http://www.mydomain.com" name="mainframe" frameborder="0" noresize="noresize" scrolling="auto">
<noframes>Sorry, you don"t appear to have frame support.
Go here instead - <a href="http://www.mydomain.com"></a></noframes>
</frameset>

Put that in the template for your web site, and behold - you have the contents of your Blog*Spot blog displayed right there. And if all that you care about is your readers visually able to read the content of the blog, you're done.

<frameset rows="100%">
<frame title="http://myblog.blogspot.com" src="http://myblog.blogspot.com" name="mainframe" frameborder="0" noresize="noresize" scrolling="auto">
<noframes>Sorry, you don"t appear to have frame support.
Go here instead - <a href="http://myblog.blogspot.com"></a></noframes>
</frameset>


Of course, your Host web site won't have the blog content - just a frame. If having the Host web site indexed by the search engines - which is one of the advantages of a custom domain - is of interest to you, forget about using Frames. The search engines won't see anything in the Target web site. And likewise, forget about the readers of the Host web site providing any weight for the Target web site.

All weight goes to the empty Host web site. What a waste.

Another casualty with frames forwarding will be the blog feed. With a "301 Moved Permanently", anybody subscribed to a BlogSpot feed, from a blog published to to a custom domain, gets the feed from the custom domain URL, transparently. If the domain uses frames forwarding, to redirect to the BlogSpot URL, this won't work. A frame visually displays the blog itself, it's not going to display the feed.

Frame forwarding is simply another spurious custom domain solution.

For more discussion on this controversy:
So no, it appears that Frames are not a substitute for a properly setup custom domain.

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