URL masking

[SimonaCretu]

Hi all,

Within my organization we maintain a bunch of websites, say child1.com, child2.com and child3.com. It was recently suggested that we merge all three into a single one, say mother.com. The marketing community within my organization strongly argued against this, mainly due to risks related to brand awareness, rank and traffic loss for each of these websites. But we resigned to the idea that we must do it, so we started considering the next proper steps.

Now, my understanding is that setting up redirects is crucial in order to cushion the fall and mitigate the losses. However, some people are suggesting url masking. To me personally, url masking doesn't sound like a white hat practice, maybe it's borderline grey, but the bottom line is I need some advice on this topic. Could someone kindly address the following:

1. How is url masking different from url redirect?

2. Is url masking different from url cloaking?

3. Would google penalize us for implementing url masking?

4. Would that have any impact on our PPC campaigns?

5. Are there any documented cases of successful and google-sanctioned websites that are actively using url masking?

6. Are there any pitfalls to using this strategy?

Thank you