How do you incorporate a Wordpress blog onto an ecommerce website?
-
Hello there,
We have a company website: http://www.parklanechampagne.co.uk/ and a Wordpress blog: http://www.alastairharrison.me/ and I would like the blog on the subfolder http://www.parklanechampagne.co.uk/blog so that we get maximum SEO benefit from updating this regularly (I understand this would be better than putting it on a subdomain blog.parklanechampagne.co.uk?).
The Wordpress blog is hosted externally but I was after some advice on how we can move this blog to the parklanechampagne/blog subfolder?
Any help gratefully received - I've asked several SEO and web agencies this question and had a lot of contrasting replies!
Many thanks, Jon
-
If it's done correctly and Google sees it as if it lives in the subfolder, then yes - it's perfectly fine for SEO. This is a technically tricky solution, though, and would really depend on the capabilities of your hosting provider.
-
Hi Andrea, thank you for your comments - I'm definitely keen to avoid anything to painstaking and most importantly, costly! Jon
-
Thanks Ben, I feel this is good advice also safer, quicker and easier to run a blog in its native environment. Cheers, Jon
-
Hi Peter,
Many thanks for sending those two links over - I'm leaning on perhaps setting up a new .net blog so that it'll be easier to integrate with our site.Regarding your last point, it we run the current Wordpress blog on a separate server and make it look like it "lives" on a subfolder would it still have the same SEO benefit?
Cheers, Jon
-
The php-compiler.net blog article about running php on a .net platform is interesting, but wherever possible its always better to run applications in their native environment.
-
As someone who is currently dealing with the making a WP blog look like it lives on a subdomain, I will agree with Dr. Pete that it's very tricky.
-
Hi Jon,
Thank you for your feedback, its much appreciated and I'm glad I could assist. To answer your question, a blog can be written in any server-side language (PHP, .net, Clasic ASP, Ruby etc).
You will often find that .net hosting will be more expensive as opposed to php.
-
I can't vouch for these tactic, but there are ways to port WordPress to .Net. For example:
http://www.php-compiler.net/blog/2011/wordpress-on-net-4-0
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wordpressnet/
It might be better to go with a .Net-native app, but it's not completely impossible to run WordPress.
Can they set up a reverse proxy? You could theoretically run the current WordPress blog on a separate server, but then make it look like it "lives" on a subdomain or subfolder. It's a bit tricky, but it's possible.
-
Dear Peter, Andrea and Ben. Thank you all for taking the time to help answer my query. The points re security are valid and also Ben, thank you for your step by step response - much needed by an SEO novice!
However, I spoke to my web agency today and they have told me that they can only run .net blogs on their server and not .php which our current Wordpress blog is written in : ( Does anyone know of any blogs written in .net?
Thank you once again, Jon
-
It's probably true that the subdomain approach is easier, but I lean toward the subfolder these days - it's possible for subdomains to fragment in some cases and not pass all authority to the root domain. The subfolder can help preserve that inbound link value.
Ben and Andrea's comments about the difficulty of subfolders and potential risk of integrating WordPress on to your main servers are certainly valid and worth considering. I'm definitely not an expert on WP migration, and there's more than one way to achieve it. It's possible to actually keep the WP installation on a separate server and then make it act as if it "lives" under the "/blog" subfolder with a reverse proxy, but that's pretty complex:
http://www.apachetutor.org/admin/reverseproxies
No matter which route you go, keep in mind that you'd need to 301-redirect all of the old URLs to either the subdomain or subfolder version. Simply moving the WP installation won't migrate the inbound link-juice or traffic. Both visitors and spiders need to be redirected to the new URLs - that's absolutely critical.
-
Thank you Andrea. You've also made some good points as well. Obviously storing WordPress on a sub-domain would seem to be the safest option if the website is an e-commerce site, but having WordPress stored in a separate database really would be a necessity. The last thing you'd want to happen is for their WordPress blog to be hacked and data to be deleted from the blog and the e-commerce system simultaneously.
As far as WordPress vulnerabilities go you need to ensure you use trusted and highly used plugins. There is a plugin called WP Security Scan (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan) that might outline ways you could secure the blog.
If WordPress security is a potential concern here are a few things I would recommend doing (or getting your hosting company to do for you):
1: Password protect the wp-admin directory with a .htaccess fileBy password protecting the WordPress admin area, if a malicious user tries to access your WordPress admin area login page to launch a brute-force attack, or any other file which resides in the wp-admin directory to send a harmful crafted HTTP request, he is greeted with a server side login prompt and no direct access to WordPress files is possible. Something like this should do, but feel free to suggest improvements:
_ AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/.htpasswd__ AuthType Basic__ AuthName “restricted”__ Order Deny,Allow__ Deny from all__ Require valid-user__ Satisfy any_2: Change the wordpress table prefix from wp_ to something else.This will make sure that a malicious user cannot insert wp_<table_name<strong>> into their scripts to compromise the database.</table_name<strong>3: Install and use the Login LockDown plugin to restrict failed login attempts (brute force attacks) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/4: Don't use 'admin' account and use strong passwords.http://www.safepasswd.com is good for generating strong passwords if required.
5. Restrict access to /wp-admin to known IP addresses (Public Home IP and a Public Work IP for instance)
Put a .htaccess file in /wp-admin with the following:
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
Allow from xx.xx.xx.xxYou can use whatismyip.com to file the ip addresses you want to use and just update it as necessary
-
I think Ben outlines some great, actionable steps - there's one word of caution I'll throw out and that it's not necessarily that easy, depending on how your back end is set up.
I recently looked at something similar, and because of issues hosting WP (with PHP) on our server, we had to worry about hacking and the integrity of our shopping cart checkout system being vulnerable. So that wasn't a viable option to set it up as a sub folder and we had to look at a subdomain and pointing Apache at WP. (I don't want to bore you with all the technical vetting we went through, just suffice to say that theory and reality don't always go hand-in-hand.)
-
Personally I would say that having the WordPress blog as a sub-domain would be the simplest and easiest option available to you, you could always have links from the WordPress blog on the sub-domain pointing to content on parklanechampagne.co.uk to pass on some link juice from the blog.
In terms of moving the content across you would need to do a database export of the wordpress blog (if this is possible) you could always do this using WordPress Database Backup plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup) and send the .sql file to an email address.
You would then need to open the .sql file and do a find/replace on "http://www.alastairharrison.me" (note, no / on the end) and replace it with "blog.parklanechampagne.co.uk". Then you can import that .sql file into the database for your main website. If possible I would create a separate database for the blog on parklanechampagne.co.uk just to keep things nice and tidy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Structured markup for wordpress
Hello, I am having problems with marking up my WP posts. I used the All-in-One which seems to be the most user-friendly, except when I denote the aspects of the "article" and update, the markup shows up as a box at the bottom of the post (even though the info is in the text). How do I mark these up for Google without having the unseemly box at the bottom? Thanks so much in advance for any help! Btw, I am not altogether comfortable just yet on manual schematic markup (if you have a really basic manual markup that will let me do so across various platforms, I would also appreciate the recommendation). Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Google no longer is promoting my website!
My traffic just fell off the cliff and I can not figure out what has happened! Help!
Technical SEO | | PatriciaBeth0 -
Authorship and Publisher on WordPress
I successfully enabled rel=publisher on our WordPress blog, and as a test I also enabled rel=authorship for a set of blog posts. (Tested both in Google's Rich Snippets Tester.) However, on the individual blog posts the publisher credit disappears. Is there a way to enable both to appear on blog posts?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
How can i increase my website traffic
Hello, my boss has decide a build website we have more than 12500 products in ourwebsite its mtscellular.com, im new as seo but im confused and need help i want to know how somebody help me to increase my website traffic
Technical SEO | | jimmylora0 -
What is the best website structure for SEO?
I've been on SEOmoz for about 1 month now and everyone says that depending on the type of business you should build up your website structure for SEO as 1st step. I have a new client click here ( www version doesn't work)... some bugs we are fixing it now. We are almost finished with the design & layout. 2nd question have been running though my head. 1. What would the best url category for the shop be /products/ - current url cat ex: /products/door-handles.html 2. What would you use for the main menu as section for getting the most out of SEO. Personally i am thinking of making 2-3 main categories on the left a section where i can add content to it (3-4 paragraphs... images maybe a video).So the main page focuses on the domain name more and the rest of the sections would focus on specific keywords, this why I avoid cannibalization. Main keyword target is "door handles" Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
Subdomains at Yola, Blogger, Wordpress
If the purpose of constructing a site or blog is for SEO ie a linking microsite, is it better to keep as a subdomain or to register on its own domain. The question is how much of the Domain Authority of that site will flow through the subdomain to linked site. I note that these subdomains have PA of 1, does this answer my own question?? Thanks eg widgets.yolasite.com or widgets.wordpress.com
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How to re structure a website & Google
I have a website that requires the site structure to be changed. The website doesnt have many backlnks and rankings are fairly low. I have 11,000 products on the website and want to know the best way to change the site structure without causing 404 errors all over the place. Do I 301 redirect every page? drop all 11,000 pages from the index by adding a no follow no index to all pages? I have the following structure www.domain.co.uk/make/model/part/product I want to change this to www.domain.co.uk/Part/make/model/product whats the best way to preserve the SEO, link juice and on a large scale? 11,000 pages. thank you shivun
Technical SEO | | seohive-2227200 -
When moving my ecommerce website from one host to another should I also 301 all my image urls?
I'm going to be 301'ing a lot of pages, but should i also 301 my image URLS? Any other helpful hints would be awesome too, as this will be my first move online ever. We've been with our host 3 years. Thanks! Paul Serra STbands.com, Owner
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0