Simple & Legitimate way to Cloak a URL?

Question

I am not a professional with websites - just an amateur DIY dabbler, so apologies in advance if this is rather simplistic.

I have three Wordpress sites. For simplicity, let's say they are widgets.com, blue-widgets.com and red-widgets.com.

With Google AdWords, this works well as I send all searches for 'red widgets' to red-widgets.com, searches for 'blue widgets' to blue-widgets.com and everything else to the generic widgets.com.

I am now targeting the Chinese market using the AdWords equivalent from the main search engine in China, which is Baidu.com.

Whereas with AdWords, it's pay-as-you-go and it doesn't matter which site you send the traffic to, Baidu is hard work. For companies outside China they need around $3600 pre-payment. For that, you are only able to promote one website. If I wanted to promote all three, I would have to set up three accounts and send them $10,800 (which is more credit than I am likely to spend with them in several years!)

So I have set up an account just for widgets.com Javascript redirects are specifically disallowed.

What I would like to do is to set up third level domains for red.widgets.com and blue.widgets.com and have them display the home pages for red-widgets.com and blue-widgets.com respectively.

Is there a simple way that I could achieve this and how?

Answer 1

I wonder if you can use many URLs, such as the following:

• widgets.com
• widgets.com?red_widget=1
• widgets.com?blue_widget=1

If you can use such URL, you should be able to redirect the URL through a specific PHP code. Here is an example of a code that will redirection the initial URL to a new one:

if (isset($_GET['red_widget']) && $_GET['red_widget']=='1') {
  header('Location: http://red-widget.example.com/');
  exit;
}

Hope this helps.