How to fix my domain/host issues?

June 28, 2011 2:48 PM

I have a few domain and host questions and were unable to get a straight answer from neither provider. Mefi to the help?

Howdy!
So I finally decided to open a small website and registered a domain, I am a bit confused about some issues.

I registered the domain at godaddy and am hosting my site on fatcow.

1. When I first forwarded my domain to the host I noticed that after you click on any internal link the address changes from blabla.com to blabla.fatcow.com which looks off and pretty unprofessional.
2. I then figured out that I should try forward with masking and now when you click on any link it stays blabla.com instead of going to blabla.com/contact. I assume this is also not the best option because folks will not be able to bookmark the specific page they are on. I also noticed that shortly after this change, google started showing the blabla.fatcow.com page and not the blabla.com page. I want to change that.

Is forward with masking compromises SEO?
What would be the most straightforward way to fix my issues?

I called the costumer support of both godaddy and fatcow but were unable to resolve my issues.

Any suggestions?

posted by Sentus to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You want fatcow to manage the DNS for your domain. That way you don't have to do any kind of forwarding on GoDaddy's side. The pertinent information is on this page under "Add a domain registered elsewhere to your FatCow account". Basically, you need to log into your GoDaddy account and change your DNS servers to ns1.fatcow.com and ns2.fatcow.com.
posted by zsazsa at 2:55 PM on June 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

Zsazsa, thanks for your prompt respose.
I just changed it and yet when I click on different pages the adress changes back to blabla.fatcow.com/contact


Any ideas?
posted by Sentus at 3:39 PM on June 28, 2011

It takes 2 - 72 hours for DNS changed to propagate across the Internet.
posted by COD at 3:40 PM on June 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sounds good.

Another thing I haven't mentioned is that the whole website is under wordpress with the thesis theme. Should I point my domain to a wordpress subdirectory ?
posted by Sentus at 3:43 PM on June 28, 2011

No, point the domain to the web root and configure Wordpress to be at the web site root if that is where you want it. You can put Wordpress anywhere on your site and still have it load at http://example.com. It's a setting in Wordpress.
posted by COD at 3:47 PM on June 28, 2011