Custom Hostname and SEO

[MAHAROGERS]

Here's my situation. The front end of my site markrogersphotography.com is hosted by yahoo while all the galleries and fulfillment are handled through SM. Since Y! hosts me I can't edit my cname, I can only create a new record or subdomain like photos.maharogers.com to poin the SM stuff to.

Question:

I've got lots of galleries out there now with markrogersphotrography.smugmug.com domains. Will my SEO standing improve if I go the custom hostname route but my hostname for Smugmug hosted content is something like photos.markrogersphotography.com. Should I bother?

[rainforest1155]

In my experience Google takes a lot of time before recognizing your custom host name, especially if you've already established your position in the search engine with your SmugMug nickname. Both, your SmugMug address and domain, will kind of co-exist, but google won't pickup the content on your domain that already has been indexed using your SmugMug address, since it tries to avoid duplicates.

I'm not sure on how other search engines handle that.

I hope this helps a bit,
Sebastian