Product Update: Keep Your Custom Domain on Every Page of Your PhotoShelter Website

Search engine optimization and branding for your photo business are two of the best ways to reach more clients and make a lasting first impression. From your website’s look and feel to the content you create to tell your story, consistent branding and great SEO can help take your business to the next level.  

With custom features like logo upload, fonts and colors, watermarking and the ability to use your own domain name, your PhotoShelter website is a key component of how you drive your brand forward. Now, we’re helping you take things even further with an update many of you have been waiting for. 

Your custom domain will now display on *every* page of your PhotoShelter website.

If you’re using your own domain name, you’ve probably noticed that your site switches back to the PhotoShelter.com domain on certain pages (those that may require a login or billing info, like the archive area or shopping cart). Not anymore. We’ve removed the switchover to the PhotoShelter.com domain for all pages to help keep your brand consistent. 

This change also helps improve your SEO in a number of ways, so you can put your brand in front of more potential customers.  

SEO improvements

1. Goodbye duplicate content

First things first, we’re eliminating any potential “duplicate content” issues related to your custom domain. We recently introduced a series of SEO updates after consulting with a third-party SEO firm, and we learned a ton during that process. One of those learnings was that while Google is figuring out how to work around duplicate content, this can still negatively impact your ranking. 

We found duplicate content happening within PhotoShelter for members who use their own domain names because the PhotoShelter.com URL was always available in addition to the custom domain. To resolve this, we added a redirect so if someone enters your site using the PhotoShelter.com URL, it will immediately redirect to the custom domain instead. Now, this is true for all pages of your site, including the archive and shopping cart.

2. Your images, served from your domain

In the past, even though you were using your own domain, the images on your site were still coming from a PhotoShelter.com URL behind the scenes (in the HTML for your site). This is no longer the case. Your images will now be served from your custom domain – not ours. This makes your site more compatible with modern web browsers and therefore more favorable when it comes to SEO, especially in the eyes of image-specific search engines like Google Images. 

3. Cleaner Google Search Console reports and sitemap results

This update should also help clear up any confusion with your Google Search Console reports. If you use Google Search Console (we highly recommend it), and you previously submitted your sitemap under your custom domain, you likely experienced an issue of your reports excluding certain pages of your site – those that reverted back to the PhotoShelter.com domain. Additionally, the indexing of those pages was not contributing to the SEO of your custom domain. Now, your reports should look as expected, and every page of your site should help strengthen the SEO for your custom domain. 

Advanced security with reCAPTCHA

Along with SEO improvements, this update also brings an advanced layer of security to your site with reCAPTCHA v3. reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect your site from spam, and is particularly relevant for the forms on your site, like the contact page form or the client account signup form. If you’re using a custom domain, you’ll want to enable reCAPTCHA v3. Learn more about setting up reCAPTCHA here.

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All of this means better ranking in search results, more visibility and more chances for your work – and your brand – to get noticed. 

Questions about this update? Let us know!