I have some technical questions for all you webmasters out there. Particularly about how domain masking works. I’ve never used it before, but I’d like to give it a shot. I just bought the domain name PopOcculture.com (nothing on it yet, though), and I want to have this masking a directory on my site, probably something like: timboucher.com/popocculture.

Now, as I understand it, when you set up domain masking, if I’m browsing on popocculture.com, it’s going to pull the source code off timboucher.com/popocculture, but the user is still going to see the URL of popocculture.com. A couple questions on that though:

1. What about subdirectories and individual pages within that? For example, what if the originating URL is hypothetically “http://www.timboucher.com/popocculture/2005/09/02/its-a-conspiracy-and-thats-okay/“? Does that mean that the URL the user sees will be displayed as: “http://www.popocculture.com/2005/09/02/its-a-conspiracy-and-thats-okay/”? Because that’s what I want to have happen. But I’ve heard that sometimes all the user will see is the domain name and none of the other stuff. That doesn’t seem like much use to me, as I want permalinks featuring the new domain, etc.
2. How does search indexing work? If the set-up works according to how I laid it out in number 1 above, which site is going to get the search engine results in google for the keywords featured in that page? In other words, I guess the question is: does Google know that it’s simply a mask and ignores the popocculture.com domain name? Or is it going to double index, and have two competing sets of identical results under each domain name? Cause that seems pretty bad in terms of user confusion and reinforcing brand identity. What’s the solution?
3. Can you mask only part of a domain name, as in a subdirectory? Could I in other words use timboucher.com/journal as my originating source, and have it map to popocculture.com/journal, but at the same time either map other subdirectories, or keep a small amount of content on the actual popocculture server?

If anybody has some experience with this, I’d like to be able to figure it out. Number three is my ideal option I think, being able to mask individual directories. I know this can be set up with forwarding and redirects, but I don’t want that. I want the user to have a consistent experience at the popocculture.com domain. If you know anything about this or know of a good source online that answers these questions (or comes close), please drop it here in the comments or contact me directly.