CNAME entry to a subdomain?

caseserve · February 6, 2006

I own the domain CaseServe.com and have this site hosted with http://www.myinternetservices.com/
I have a CNAME with my hosting company that points gallery.caseserve.com to caseserve.smugmug.com

My control panel is set to domain: gallery.caseserve.com

I advertise my site as www.CaseServe.com when they go there I have a start page that forwards to gallery.caseserve.com

This all works great except??

I think by having a prefixed domain gallery.caseserve.com instead of caseserve.com google and other search engines are not indexing my site correctly. If I do a site listing with google to see how many enteries I have I get 7 as seen here for gallery.caseserve.com:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agallery.caseserve.com&btnG=Google+Search

caseserve.com has 2,180 but they are other pages I have on caseserve.com and not my smugmug site
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Acaseserve.com&btnG=Search

Now if I do the same thing with Andy's site for instance he has 10,300 enteries:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Amoonriverphotography.com&btnG=Search

I have my site keyworded, so I don't think that is it.

I hoping that someone can explain this to me? I'm wondering if I'm having this problem because I use gallery.caseserve.com for my smugmug site instead of caseserve.com?

I have no problem changing my smugmug site to point to caseserve.com if I can still have my site hosted with http://www.myinternetservices.com/ for all the other stuff I have. I would even be willing to prefix my non smugmug site to be something like home.caseserve.com for all my other stuff and caseserve.com to point to smugmug.com

Sorry about the length of this question. If you've made it this far maybe you can let me know if the way I'm pointed with CNAME could be stopping the search engines for indexing my site.

Thanks in advance:thumb

SamirD · February 7, 2006

Interesting issue. I'm not sure exactly why you wouldn't be getting as many results from the subdomain vs the full one. But I've seen this before. In fact, I see it all the time when checking rankings for my main site, Huntsville Car Scene.com.

If I leave the www off, the rankings and search results are different. I'm not sure why that is either since the www's make no difference since the dns forwards both to the same place.

Now, having the main domain redirected manually may be a part of it as search engine spiders may not proceed to follow the link. Just out of curiosity, why do you have it set up that way?

If you can change the main name to point directly to your smugmug account, that would probably help the problem if not fix it. But I'm not sure if you can have a subdomain hit your main site. It really all depends on your dns is set up. Some "virtual" systems have a virtual dns and it may not work.

I'd try it though. Setup your main domain name to your smugmug account. And then set your gallery sub-domain name to point to your web site server IP. That should do it.

geoeremite · February 7, 2006

caseserve wrote:

I think by having a prefixed domain gallery.caseserve.com instead of caseserve.com google and other search engines are not indexing my site correctly.

I don't know a solution, but I suspect that you're getting bit by the "duplicate sites" penalty. Essentially, when a search engine sees two different URLs with the same content, it needs to pick one of the site as the "real" site. The "real" site will get all the ranking and the "copy" site will get virtually none.

For your site, the smugmug URL is the "real" site. For Andy's site, his custom domain is the "real" site and his smugmug site is the "copy". (According to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, the former has 75 inlinks and the latter has 2,012 inlinks). You're the inverse of that (12 inlinks to caseserve.smugmug.com and 6 inlinks to gallery.caseserve.com).

It sounds like the typical solution would be to have caseserve.smugmug.com generate 301 redirects to gallery.caseserve.com (cannot be done via JS). That may have other implications so perhaps that's why it's not offered by smugmug. I also noticed that smugmug search results for users with custom domains are links to the smugmug.com address not the custom domain address. I suspect making those links go to the custom CNAMEs might help as well. But we're now well beyond the list of things that I know about SEO

cheers,
Scott

caseserve · February 7, 2006

Thanks
Thank you both for replying...

I have opened a ticket to see what the implications would be to point caseserve.com to caseserve.smugmug.com

I want to keep my hosting account with myinternetservices.com I've been with them for years and I'm quite happy with them.

But I also need to know what will happen to the content that I currently have on caseserve.com

Thanks,

caseserve · February 8, 2006

caseserve wrote:

Thank you both for replying...

I have opened a ticket to see what the implications would be to point caseserve.com to caseserve.smugmug.com

I want to keep my hosting account with myinternetservices.com I've been with them for years and I'm quite happy with them.

But I also need to know what will happen to the content that I currently have on caseserve.com

Thanks,

I have repointed my CName entry www.caseserve.com ---> caseserve.smugmug.com

Thanks,

CNAME entry to a subdomain?

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