Product Enhancement: Maintain Your Custom Domain Across Every Page of Your PhotoShelter Website

Search engine optimization (SEO) and branding strategies for photo businesses are two proven strategies for expanding clientele and creating lasting impressions with clients. From website look and feel to the content created to tell their stories, good branding practices combined with effective SEO can take your photo business to new heights of success.

PhotoShelter websites are an integral component of how brands advance, with features like logo upload, fonts and colors customization, watermarking capabilities and the option of using your own domain name – features that help drive forward their business goals. Now, PhotoShelter is helping take these capabilities a step further with an update many have been eagerly awaiting.

Your custom domain now appears on all pages of your PhotoShelter website.

If you use your own domain name for your website, you may have noticed that certain pages (like archives or shopping cart) switch back to PhotoShelter.com at certain points – no longer is there this issue; all pages now utilize their brand consistent domain.

This change can also help enhance SEO in various ways, so your brand can reach more potential customers.

2. Reduce duplicate content through SEO improvements on 1 Page Websites.

At first, we’re taking steps to eliminate any duplicate content issues related to your custom domain. After consulting with an outside SEO firm and making various updates for SEO purposes, we learned many things – one being how duplicate content still affects Google rankings negatively despite efforts at working around duplicated material by Google.

PhotoShelter discovered duplicate content issues for members who utilize custom domains, due to the PhotoShelter.com URL always remaining visible alongside their custom domain. To address this, we implemented a redirect so if someone accesses your website via PhotoShelter.com they are immediately taken back to your custom domain instead. This applies for all pages within your site – archives and shopping cart.

2. Your images hosted from your domain

At one time, even though you used your own domain name for your site, images on it still came from a PhotoShelter.com URL in your HTML. No longer! Your images will now be served from your custom domain rather than ours – making your site more compatible with modern web browsers and increasing SEO efficiency, especially among image search engines such as Google Images.

3. Enhance Google Search Console reports and sitemap results

This update should also help resolve any confusion around Google Search Console reports. If you were using it before and had submitted your sitemap under your custom domain, reports likely excluded some pages which reverted back to PhotoShelter.com domain – as indexing these pages wasn’t contributing towards strengthening SEO of your custom domain. Now your reports should look as expected and every page of your site should help strengthen its SEO.

Enhancing security with reCAPTCHA
Along with SEO improvements, this update also adds an advanced layer of security with Google reCAPTCHA v3. Google offers this free service to protect websites against spambots attempting to register accounts through forms on their sites, like contact pages and client account signup forms. If using custom domains you’ll want to enable reCAPTCHA v3 for optimal protection – learn more here about setting it up.