URL doesn't change on sub-pages or when leaving site

Question

I'm new to the world of webmasters, so I haven't been able to appropriately search for an answer. I don't know the keywords that describe my situation.

I registered hallienoelle.com and the .net version through GoDaddy and set up forwarding with masking to hallienoelle2.wpengine.com.

When you go to the .com or .net, it takes you to the homepage with no slashes or anything after it. If you click on a different page, it takes you to that page, but doesn't change the url. It still says hallienoelle.com with no slashes or anything after it.

The most worrisome part is that if someone clicks an external link my URL is still in the address bar.

For example, clicking the Powered by Wordpress link at the bottom takes you to wordpress.org, but the address bar still shows hallienoelle.com with no slashes or anything after it .

Did I do something wrong in setting up GoDaddy forwarding or is it a Wordpress/WPEngine configuration issue?

UPDATE: Thanks to PatomaS I know how to fix the external link problem. I still am unsure of how to get the directory/folder/webpage to display after the .com like so:

1. Go to hallienoelle.com (and see the content from hallienoelle2.wpengine.com)

2. Click a link, like About Us

3. This should take you to hallienoelle.com/?page_id=11 (and you see the content from hallienoelle2.wpengine.com/?page_id=11)

4. But, currently it still shows just hallienoelle.com even though you are looking at the ?page_id=11 page.

Do I have to go through all my internal links and hard-code something like <a href="hallienoelle.com/?page_id=11" target="_top">About Us</a>?

This seems inefficient and error prone. I'm probably just misunderstanding something.

UPDATE 2: WPEngine also gives me the option of forwarding to http://198.58.98.52/ and I (think) it reads the requested URL from the header and serves my content.

I add this because as I've been reading someone said redirects to mysite.example.com are generally used for free hosting providers and are looked down upon. I use hallienoelle2.wpengine.com because it is recommended on http://wpengine.com/support/how-to-configure-your-dns/ under the heading Setting up a subdomain.

Answer 1

Checking you code, we can see that you have this:

<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
  <frame src="http://hallienoelle2.wpengine.com" frameborder="0" />
  <frame frameborder="0" noresize />
</frameset>

I suppose that is the masking part of the setting on GoDaddy that you mention.

Which means that you are using frames on your site. All the content is on the lower frame, the one that says <frame frameborder="0" noresize />. and your links are normal one, like this:

Powered by <a href="http://www.wordpress.org">WordPress</a>

you have to change that link to something like this

Powered by <a href="http://www.wordpress.org" target="_top">WordPress</a>

or

Powered by <a href="http://www.wordpress.org" target="_parent">WordPress</a>

Although both options work slightly different, there is no difference in your actual situation.

Update

Since all the pages/resources from http://hallienoelle2.wpengine.com/ are inside the frame in hallienoelle.com, you can not see any change in the URL bar.

All the links from http://hallienoelle2.wpengine.com/ will work normally, but the idea of the masking, is to keep the hallienoelle.com on the URL, all the time.

When you edit your code or pages on http://hallienoelle2.wpengine.com/ or when you add more content there, don't worry about the other address, just do all the editing and linking as if hallienoelle.com didn't exist. In fact, for http://hallienoelle2.wpengine.com/, hallienoelle.com doesn't exist. It's just a concept on our mind as users.