Domain forwarding to my Standard account suddenly masked?

Diamond D

Hi all, I am quite inexperienced in web hosting matters, but ~1.5yrs ago I bought a custom domain from GoDaddy/SmugMug (www.DiamondDphotography.com) and set it up so that www.DiamondDphotography.com and http://DiamondDphotography.com both pointed toward my SmugMug page (http://diamondd.smugmug.com).

For as long as I have had this setup, if I enter www.DiamondDphotography.com in my browser, as soon as I get to my SmugMug page the url bar displayed DiamondD.smugmug.com. I understand this was because SmugMug "breaks" the masked forward, and I actually prefer it that way. As long as I am still using my standard account, I don't have to worry about cookies and ordering, and I like people to be able to see the full smugmug URL up top when they move into a category or gallery.

But as of yesterday, I noticed that now my forward is masked - the url displays wwww.DiamondDphotography.com when I reach my smugmug page, and I does not change when I enter a category or gallery.

I see that my domain manager is set to Forwarding with Masking, so I assume that changing that to Forward Only will make it go back to the old way. But I am wondering if something changed on SmugMug's end? Finally, will I lose anything as far as search engine status, etc, but no longer having the "title, description, keywords" fields filled out on my forwarding with masking options?

Thank you in advance!

jfriend

Something did change on Smugmug's end of things several months ago when they introduced nicenames. Now, if you have a custom domain set and you enter a gallery, Smugmug will switch to the one custom domain set for your account, regardless of how you entered the site. I believe this also helps SEO because galleries are only accessible from one URL, not two separate ones so you get higher ratings on the one.

Andy

Hello, well - I'm really not sure, since we only support Custom Hostnames with Power and Pro accounts. I'll ask our domain experts if they can stop by and perhaps have a peek.

docwalker

Nick,

I am not aware of any changes in the last few weeks related to this. But, you do not want to use forwarding with masking. That is one thing I am sure of. Turn that off and you should be good to go.

Diamond D

Well I went ahead and changed my domain settings to Forwarding Only, and it's back to behaving the way it used to, the way I want it to with no masking.

I certainly appreciate you guys taking a look and answering even though you don't support custom domain names with the standard account. Great customer service and superior gallery layout are what separate SmugMug from the rest, IMO!