Some of us have been suffering to figure out how to set up a CNAME record for the primary domain. Today, I found the answer from another user on the Blogger help group. No longer will you have to use domain forwarding to bounce off of Blogger's servers to get both www.domainname.com and domainname.com working.
The following guide will show you how to get Blogger working properly with a GoDaddy hosted domain.
WARNING: Using a primary domain CNAME alias will effectively override your MX records at GoDaddy. This is a known issue as of 12/27/07. If you wish to use MX records (for example for GMail for domains), use the forwarding method instead of the solution outlined in this post.
Step 1: Have a Blogger hosted blog. E.g. "yourblogname.blogspot.com"
Step 2: Have a GoDaddy parked domain. E.g. "yourdomainname.com"
Step 3:
- Set up a CNAME referral for the alias www under GoDaddy's Total DNS control panel to the host ghs.google.com
- Set up a CNAME referral for the alias yourdomainname.com pointing to the host ghs.google.com
Step 4: Setup custom domain on Blogger by going to Settings->Publishing and entering your www.yourdomainname.com (or yourdomainname.com) address.
IMPORTANT: If you have Google Apps running for your domain, such as Gmail for Domains, you MUST login to http://google.com/a/ and disable Web Pages before blogger will allow you to publish to a www subdomain.
Conculusion:
If all is setup correctly, www.yourdomainname.com is now hosting your blog. Yourdomainname.com bounces to www.yourdomainname.com (or visa versa depending on how you set it up). All of this is completely transparent to your users and whether they remebmer www or not no longer matters.
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45 comments:
Thanks for the step-by-step directions. Some of us need to be led by the hand! I really appreciate all the time you've taken with me. Great blog. I've got it bookmarked. It's the first place I'll come for blogger help from now on!
One question, im having troble publishing and I cant find where to disable Web Pages. Please just help with that, thanks.
Thank you so much for your help! I've been trying and trying to figure this out. No other site has the tip about adding a CNAME for your own, specific domain, But that's such an important step! Your blog looks great by the way. Here's mine: http://boxofficejunkie.blogspot.com Hopefully, it will just be www.theboxofficejunkie.com when I'm done with this process
Ok, I did everything you said, and when I come back to blogger, it won't add it because it says that another blog is already hosted there.
Is there something I'm missing?
Kristin did you login to http://google.com/a/ and turn off Web Pages? That's the most common reason Blogger won't let you publish to a www subdomain.
Thanks, this is great!
I have a small problem though... If I put a CNAME for mydomain.com to ghs.google.com, then I lose the ability to have email sent to mydomain.com forwarded to my
GMail account. Do you know of a way to have both?
I've disabled pages, but now my site comes up as an Error 404, page not found. Is there something else I'm missing, or is that because Google Apps might still be updating?
You've been extremely helpful, thanks very much!
@ Kristin, the 404 can be eradicated by changing back to blogspot publishing and then back to your custom domain. It's glitch on Google's end it's the only way I know of fixing it.
http://www.compender.com/2007/12/custom-domain-404-page-not-found-quick.html
@Goozak, do you mean have your GoDaddy hosted email forwarded to GMail?
Why not skip forwarding and setup GMail for domains?
http://www.google.com/a/
Awe crap. Goozak you just found a huge conflict between GoDaddy, apps and GMail.
When you have yourdomain.com as a CNAME alias, GoDaddy returns it as your MX records!!!!
So, in order to use your custom MX records you have to delete the yourdomain.com CNAME.
No wonder I haven't been receiving emails.
-R
Raymond thanks for your help.
I setup my CNAME before and it is working fine except ut3mod.com doesn't redirect to www.ut3mod.com. I added the new cname record with alias ut3mod.com at godaddy like you show on your tutorial. Still nothing I get the parked page at ut3mod.com. The weird thing is that my other domain everything works fine and I didn't add the extra cname record. herbygarcia.com
It is finally working now Ray. I just enabled forwarding at godaddy to my blogspot address. Should I leave the ut3mod.com alias cname record or delete it.
Thanks again.
You are a god!
Do you know how many entries on the "support" group I read to try to get this to work!
The critical part for me was to add the additional CNAME record of mydomain.org to ghs.google.com
I can't thank you enough.
Happy New Year.
Thanks, Raymond. Your post was very helpful. I was getting the evil 404 for the afternoon until I read the scoop. I find it odd that the Blogger directions left out the second additional CNAME record bit.
omg this is finally fixed. thx
what's in your A HOST record???
My A record is the default GoDaddy parked IP address. Contact GoDaddy if you don't remember what yours was, or if you deleted it.
The default parked GoDaddy IP is what allows you to use domain forwarding as well as the 90 "subdomain" redirects you get with a GoDaddy domain.
So not having it can be very problematic.
You rule! Neither the Blogger nor GoDaddy tutorials were making any sense. This works in seconds. You've saved my sanity!
i do all corect and
www.mydomain.com point to my blog
,but mydomain.com point to goddady parked page
why ? i want both to point my blog
Thank you soooo much! What a headache - due to incomplete instructions everywhere else. You ROCK!
Great info, BUT another warning: this solution may mess-up email settings at GoDaddy.
By doing this set-up it stopped all inbound email to my domain. By using the Forward solution, the inbound mail issue was resolved -- plus the blog was correctly hosted at Google.com
@coe ...
That's the first warning at the top of the page ...
Yep, I was just adding to the warning as some folks may be using regular plain old Godaddy-hosted email - not "GMail for domains". Thanks for the great work!
I went round and round and ROUND with godaddy and help group ideas until I finally gave up and bought a domain from blogger- very simple because they take care of all the set-up
Much Mahalos!!! I've been trying make it work for the better part of a day! It was driving me INSANE. If you hadn't written that I had to turn off my web pages, I think I would never have continued.
Hey ur 2 much!!! thnx a lot... ive searched a lot in google but couldn find this answer.. thnx again
hi raymond. great blog! added you already on my bookmark list! one quick question, with your post, i succesfully redirect my blogspot address to my domainname.com ... but the problem is that one should write www.mydomain.com in order to see my BLOG, if one writes mydomain.com he will see "the park page" of my domainname and not redirect to my blog. help pls. thanks in advance.
-j
Thank you very much for your step by step guide. I have been Struggling to switch to my custom domain www.playingviolin.org .My domain works now.
Didn't work for me either. I haven't been able to get tubapoker.com to redirect to www.tubapoker.com for months, and I've tried just about everything.
Wow, just wow. I've been working on this situation for the past twenty four hours and your steps took around five minutes. Thank you very much! I will spread the word. Now all of my domain works whether I use www or not. Hooray!
P.S. You are being thanked in my blog.
Can you please write the same entry for enom domains bought through google aps? I own a domain and can't make my blog get tot he domain. Please please help. thanks!
I came across your blog while trying to figure out how to get my domain to work...sent an email to godaddy without any reply. I just have to say that you are a blessing to me. The solution was so simple and yet it was so hard to find.
Thank you very much!
...now I just need to fix the www. part... :P
It works for me, but I can't access my blog when using the original blogspot url. It said that those using that url would not be lost. Any ideas?
Thank you so much! After days of waiting for my blog to transfer to it's new domain, I followed your instructions & it worked it SECONDS!
Thank you. I was having such a hard time with getting this set up, and the blogger directions were pretty vague. I very much appreciate it.
It is a nice tutorial. I will make my first domain hosting in blogspot. But when I see my domain at go daddy , it write that " THIS DOMAIN IS NOT FORWARDED "
I am a newbie and it makes me very confused , would you help me ?
Thank you very much.
I type in my custom url and all I see is the google search in. I type in the entire blogspot url of my blog and the same thing happens, but the url changes to the custom url.
In otherwords, my blog is nowhere to be found! :-(
Somehow I doubt this is DNS related.
Thank you sooo much!!!! I was having the hardest time figuring out what I was doing wrong between the www and the no www!!! It's fixed now!
Good Karma to you buddy! Thanks for contributing to "humanity".
thank you very much !
godaddy & blogspot did not
make An excellent explanation like you !
coz i spent a week searching for this
:)
Much appreciated! Like other comments, I've been searching google to find an explanation better than Go Daddy's, and you were the only correct resort! Thank you!
Hello there, I try this today but my address keeps displaying the redirect notice from blogger.com.
Do I need to give it more time or I am doing something wrong.
My account is with godaddy and I follow all your tutorial by changing the CNames Alias to my site and pointing to ghs.google.com All this after redirecting the site to my site.blogspot.com
Hi there!!
Thank you soo sooooo much for this tutorial. My blog went haywire for a week. Been through so many tutorials until I found yours and it worked within minutes. OMG! You don't know how relieved I am right now!! So big thanks to you!! YOU ROCK!
I don't know why blogger help or godaddy doesn't just tell it this way.. jeezzz..
I would like to have my blog point directly to my custom domain, (currently it just redirects). Unfortunately when I provided the CNAME ghs.google.com to the company administering my domain registration, they told me the following:
"I am unable to make a cname for ghs.google.com.
I will need an ip to make the cname, can you request an ip from them."
So, before I go through the pain of emailing google/blogger, does anyone know how I can get an IP to make the CNAME for my blog?
Thanks!
upskrt@gmail.com
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