Custom Host Names - Search engines

[Mitch]

Not really a smugmug thing so I'm not sure if this is the right palce for this, but who else would I ask:dunno

After I upgraded my SM account to a PRO account I got to thinking (always a bad move on my part) that I needed a PRO sound name to go with it. I don't remember how but I changed the name from mitch.smugmug.com to mthphoto.smugmug.com. The account works fine. The problem is when I do a search on google for mthphoto I get a hit. "mthphoto - powered by smugmug" or something like that, but the actual address it tries to send me to is mitch.smugmug.com:scratch so of course it goes to smugmug.com home page.

Is there a way to fix this?

If I buy a domain name and follow the directions in SM help will that fix it?

From what I can tell I don't need to pay for hosting on the domain because SM is kind of doing that.

Can I buy more than one domain and use the cname thing to point all to my SM account?

Thanks

Mitch

[onethumb]

Not really a smugmug thing so I'm not sure if this is the right palce for this, but who else would I ask:dunno

After I upgraded my SM account to a PRO account I got to thinking (always a bad move on my part) that I needed a PRO sound name to go with it. I don't remember how but I changed the name from mitch.smugmug.com to mthphoto.smugmug.com. The account works fine. The problem is when I do a search on google for mthphoto I get a hit. "mthphoto - powered by smugmug" or something like that, but the actual address it tries to send me to is mitch.smugmug.com:scratch so of course it goes to smugmug.com home page.

Is there a way to fix this?

If I buy a domain name and follow the directions in SM help will that fix it?

From what I can tell I don't need to pay for hosting on the domain because SM is kind of doing that.

Can I buy more than one domain and use the cname thing to point all to my SM account?

Thanks

Mitch

Alas, this is a Google thing that we have no control of. Depending on how "important" it thinks you are, it could take up to 30 days for them to "fix" this problem.

Luckily, it generally thinks smugmug is pretty important these days, so it might take less time. Who knows?

You generally only need to pay your domain registrar to buy the domain and then do DNS for it. You don't need to pay a web service to host your webpages or anything, unless you want webpages other than what smugmug provides.

You cannot use more than one hostname+domainname with smugmug on a single account, sorry.

Hope that helps!

Don

[Mitch]

Hi Don,

As I said it wasn't a SM thing but thanks for you quick response. Now as far as google taking some time to get it changed, I changed the name to mthphoto.smugmug.com over 6 - 7 months ago:dunno. No biggie though. When I'm ready I'll just get the domain name and use cname to link it to SM.

Thanks again,


Mitch

[flyingpylon]

Once mitch.smugmug.com gets into Google's index, and if that domain name continues to work when it tries to reindex it, it's going to be hard to get it out of there. I would try to create some links to mthphoto.smugmug.com from some other sites and see if Google picks up on them. For best results, put "mthphoto" in the link text. Before too long, mthphoto.smugmug.com should at least rank higher than mitch.smugmug.com for the term "mthphoto".