Web design experts needed to answer bizarre trivia question:

So, I'm surfing the web, right? And I come across a cool site but I noticed when I was getting ready to bust a link to this cool article and realized, there was no link. Every single page you went to was still just the base URL. I ended figuring out that I was in a frame.

So, I'm a curious type and was immediately thinking that this was seriously questionable practice from an SEO and who knows how many other standpoints. I did a google search and sure enough, there was only one page that was indexed and it was the index page.

It took me a minute before I figured out why this was done this way. The site is being hosted on another domain. Example:

This is the website in question:

http://www.cincinnatirrclub.com/

This is an article that I did a "reload frame in new tab":

http://edgecliffpress.com/cincinnatirrclub/barnes-noble-circa-1933

So, I see what the issue is, but I really think the solution is worse than the problem in this case. Now, I know how to do a 301 or other redirect scenarios, but I don't know if you can redirect and "mask" the root where the files are.

You'd think the hosting for the original site (edgecliffpress) would allow adding more domains to the same hosting, but I'm guessing some may not. (Then you just 301 to the subdirectory of your choice...real easy.)

So, what the deal here? Is this bad practice...necessary evil...what would you do in this situation? Maybe this isn't an issue, maybe they want it this way...but it seems to me your hiding the site more or less.

Answer all your questions the way you're leaning (bad practice, etc) and basically I got nothing to add.

Some hosting companies don't allow multiple domain names on one account so one of the ways of dealing with that in the past has been to do exactly what you found, throw up a frame that holds the 'phantom' domain name and then point to the (sub-)site on the main domain. This is typically accomplished via a free service from the domain registration company. (Some charge. )

My current hosting company offers unlimited domain names (and unlimited space, email addies etc -- but, of course, it all has to be accessed through the same control panel, so it's only good if you're responsible for all the sites on the domain -- but it could work out for a web developer with smaller clients who don't want/need access to their own hosting control) but many have various restrictions.

My old company -- which was a lot more expensive -- allowed up to 25 domains, I think, but all the email addresses were cross mapped (aliased across all the shared domains -- so joeblow@blahblah.com was the same mail account as joeblow@yaddayadda.com, which gets complicated fast if you want things like info@

But my new hosts are pretty hip. The main downside is kind of a funky year-at-a-time pricing, and multi-year discounts. It takes a bit of a leap of faith to jump in. So far, it's been mostly pretty good, but a couple times now I've caught my sites down and had to call in to get them to reset the server. They have a lot of Drupal people and Drupal people sometimes get in trouble with overtaxing server resources when they don't know what they're doing or implement something new without being on top of things -- but the host company slaps their hand pretty hard -- their site gets taken down until they straighten out the issue. If it ain't one thing, it's another, huh? (I can give folks my current hosting company name but I'm iffy about recommending anything at this point. If it ain't one thing, it is another. )