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I have a personal Google Apps account for my family. My wife and I recently started working with an organization on a new website for them, and we initially created the site using Google Sites from our Google Apps accounts. What they'd like to do is use the website for their domain, but I don't want to mingle my personal Google Apps account with the organization's, nor make the organization's site and hosting dependent on my personal domain account.

So I have a Google Apps account for personal-example.com, and the site exists in its Google Sites implementation, so URLs currently look like https://sites.google.com/a/personal-example.com/organization-site/.

What we want to do is map the site to www.organization-example.com without adding organization-example.com to personal-example.com's Google Apps account. However, the only mapping option I can seem to find is to map the site to subdomain.personal-example.com.

According to the "Mapping your site to your own URL" support document at Google, it looks like the option simply isn't there.

If that's the case, what can I do to get from what I have to what I want?

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The only way to get Google Sites to map a domain name that's not a subdomain of the Google Apps account that the site is bound to is to create the site itself from an account that's not managed by Google Apps.

Basically, I had to create a new Google Account (signing up for a new Google Mail account is the easiest way) and create the site using that account. Now the Web Address settings are available in the new site's settings. I can then make anyone else (even Google Apps accounts) owners that can manage the site.

The google-sites-liberation tool could at least migrate the content from one site to the other. It doesn't migrate the theme settings or fix image URLs though. It leaves me with some work to do, but much less than if I'd had to rebuild from scratch.

I was unable to share the site immediately -- presumably as an anti-spam measure on Google's part. Attempting to share the site immediately returned the "Sorry, you have exceeded your sharing quota." error message. After a couple days I was able to share the site.

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You could edit your DNS Records to achive this:

A new CNAME record www.organization-example.com points to https://sites.google.com/a/personal-example.com/organization-site/(not sure) OR to subdomain.personal-example.com(Sure)

So:

  • Add subdomain.personal-example.com to your google sites.
  • Point www.organization-example.com to subdomain.personal-example.com by using a cname.

Although it will change the URL in browser, and thus user will know.

A Cname is just a DNS redirect. It simply tells that foo.com is redirected to bar.com. So, CNAME can do what you have requested.

Add your domain registrars, or better, domains in your question if you want more info.

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  • First, a CNAME can't reference an URL. Second, I don't want to make organization-example.com dependent on the continued existence of personal-example.com by pointing www.organization-example.com to subdomain.personal-example.com and pointing the Google Site at the latter.
    – afrazier
    Aug 15, 2012 at 3:01
  • OK, maybe I din't understand. I will read more. But at the moment most of my Google-Apps related domains' CNAMEs mail.foo.com, site.foo.com etc point to ghs.google.com OR googlehosted.com, whereas A Records of foo.com points to IP Addresses given by Google.
    – DavChana
    Aug 15, 2012 at 3:54

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