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
-
My android website not showing on results
my website will index good،and its top on some few keywords but its not top for many keywords . << some time it showed on results but will be hidden after some time >> what you thing??? url is https://android-apk.org
Technical SEO | | moztabliq10 -
Why add .html to WordPress pages?
A site I may take over has a plugin that adds .html to the pages. I searched online but I’ve only found how to add it rather than why to add it. Is it needed? If I remove it, I’ll have to be careful with SEO / indexed pages and redirects. The site is running 3.x.x and 90% of the plugins have not been updated in over 5 years including this one. Before I update to 4.7.x, I am trying to understand the landscape (pros / cons) on why something could be used and if I need to find a suitable replacement for it.
Technical SEO | | acktivate2 -
To merge website and blog?
I was hoping to get a bit of advice if possible. Our website has a domain authority of 25. Our blog, on a separate platform has a domain authority of 73. In essence, we were wondering if we should move all the content from our blog to our website and then set up redirects? What's stopped us so far is the fear that the links from the blog, with the higher domain authority, are having a positive effect on the website, and if we were to move the content we'd lose the value of those backlinks. So I was wondering if you could possibly advise me on the matter? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Stone_Junction0 -
Website no longer visible Search Results
Overnight my website no longer appears in search engines for the two keywords I use. The website has been nicely climbing up (very steady progress to 42 and 73) the overnight it has vanished off the Radar. I have checked my webmaster account, no messages etc. Please can anyone shed any light on why this has happened? Website is http://www.securityjobsuk.co.uk Many thanks in advance for any help with this. D
Technical SEO | | SJUK0 -
Including videos on an eCommerce website.
Hi,
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate
We're about to start integrating video content on our eCommerece site in order to bolster the quantity and diversity of useful content that each page presents a potential customer. We’re talking product reviews, information relating to the differences between different products and company information. From an SEO perspective it has been suggested that Google will like this however I have a question regarding the actual method of integration. Usually I would just insert some embed code linking to the correct video on our YouTube channel however I’m really conscious that a search engine will just see the embed code, notice the page loads slightly slower and not really gain anything useful from the video file. I’m assuming that this isn’t the case but I have several questions: - Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page. Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable? - Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site? - Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page? If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO? These are probably all pretty basic questions for which I do apologise but I want to make sure that before spending a sizable amount of time on this that we start off with a correct integration! Many thanks0 -
When will seomoz rank my website?
Hi all, I am really excited to be here. I joined seo moz three weeks ago. Seo moz crawled my website twice and still under competitive domain analysis my domain authority is 1 and everything else underneath is zero. I fixed some errors and warning after first crawl but still nothing in root domain metrics. Can anyone please explain whats happening? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | proaspirant0 -
Internal Links on eCommerce sites
I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Wordpress plugins for SEO
Hello I am new to wordpress I just have started using it. Can anyone suggest me some useful tools / plugins / setting for SEO? I am further intrested in sepeeding up Wp. Any good advive on wp an seo would be appriciated.
Technical SEO | | sesertin0