Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
-
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us.
Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog).
We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum.
We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to:
- 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed.
- Submit new site maps to search engines.
- Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.).
- Send out a newsletter to our subscribers.
- Update our forum members.
- Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure.
Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period?
OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains?
Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally!
Thanks
Jay
-
Ah, yes that does change things a bit! In that case go back to your first post and do what it there. I'd agree that if you are changing the store anyway then having that as the root make sense. Your checklist is pretty good. I'd add "build new links to the new categories" too.
However I still think that the key to success for a site like your is getting the content closer to the product. You need to get the stock next to your content, where as it sounds like you are doing the opposite (putting content in to the shop). That is OK if it is supporting the sales process, but try to think of everything flowing towards the shop not aware from it.
Sounds like interesting times.
-
Thanks again Mat,
Another thing I should have mentioned (we have lots of project on the go right now!) is that we are redesigning the shop and at the point we are changing our URL structure we are also launching an updated version of the shop software (latest version of Magento - to help with internal admin issues) along with a new theme for the shop itself. Our shop has around 25,000 customers and we are using Magento's features to reduce our product page count from 35,000 to around 1,000 (thanks to Bundle and Configurable products) to reduce the number of similar pages per fitment etc.
The new shop theme (which will also incorporate our new home page) will feature content from the blog and forum - but is based around the shop.
I like some of your ideas in terms of linking to shop categories at the end of blog posts for related products.
We have a system in place (although currently disabled) that displays adverts on the forum from the shop based on keywords picked up in threads - the system is currently being refined at the moment.
-
I thought that must be what you were aiming for (because it certainly looks like a huge opportunity). I don't know whether changing the URL structure is going to help you though.
If I were working on it my ideal solution would be to rebuild on an integrated platform that could blend the 3 parts of the site using a common architecture. My choice would be drupal + drupal commerce. I'd build a common vocabulary (taxonomy) that was used for dsicussions, articles and stock items so that if users were having a discussion about tuning a Nissan 200sx then they'd see the top selling tuning components for that car. Likewise I'd be tying profiles back to the store (my ride) and articles back to it too.
However ideal solutions aren't cheap and you probably didn't come here looking for ways to blow 5-figure sums!
As the other end of the scale I'd be looking at what specific changes would help you hit those two goals: Better crawling of the shop. More users in the shop. There are probably some cheap easy wins there:
Home page : Spend some money on getting that right. Treat it as your website homepage not yourblog home page. Get recently added products, best sellers etc up on that page and link in to the blog less. Even if you have to manually edit it once a week that will probably be a win.
Blog: Get in the habit of ending blog posts with a related list - just link in to relevant categories of the shop. Keep the users and the link equity flowing.
Forum: Harder. You have the category block on the forum home page, but stats from forums I run suggest most people hardly use that page and don't scroll down much on it. Most come in and just hit "new posts" a lot. You could looking at some of the add-ons that let you have sponsored sections in forums and use these to run internal adverts related to each category. The tricky would be to change them frequently to stop ad blindness. Maybe mix them up with occasional big offers for members to help "train" them to look out for adverts.
I'd also look at the menu. Consider 'demoting' some items to make sure everyone knows it is shop + blog + forum. Sub menus for the shop categories would help make it easier to access the store and also help with deeper indexing.
I could go on all day. Can you tell I like the site ?
-
Thanks for your reply Mat, I guess I should have been a bit more specific with the project!
The goal is to get more of our site visitors to view the shop, and increase awareness of the products we supply. Currently the blog makes us no money, and since the majority of visitors (to articles not the homepage) come via other source such as Facebook and other back-links it doesn't seem right to me to have the shop "tucked away out back" when it should be in the shop window. The blog to me is the 3rd most valuable of the 3 sections on our site - with the shop 1st and the forums 2nd, so the plan is to re-arrange things to ensure the most important asset is the one you are presented with on our homepage.
Part of the goal is to ensure that Google crawls more of the shop products and that more of our back-links add to our product/category rankings on our shop since currently lots of our incoming links are just to driftworks.com (i.e. the blog) this value could be put to better use! I think...?
-
Nice project. It sounds daft, but what are you actually trying to achieve?
Looking at your home page it is only really a visit to the blog as you call it that. It's a stand alone page with a bit of everything anyway. What do you want to achieve that you can't do with a home page redesign?
I'm going to presume that somewhere in the mix the aim is to get more of that traffic spending money.
Forums are a tricky one. People tend to use packaged forum products that feels distinct from the rest of the site (vbulletin in your case) - which encourages people to just use the forum and ignore the bits of the site that actually make money. I'm tackling that issue on a site at the moment.
Moving to subdomains would probably encourage that if anything. If that were my project I'd be looking to make the 3 parts more integrated not less. That way those who come for the community aspect wouldn't be tucked away in their own area away from all the good money making stuff!
Couple of examples: You are using tags on the blog but these don't tie back in to shop categories or products. Likewise you have discussion on blog posts, but these don't relate to the forum. I'd be trying to blur the line between all three elements as much as possible.
I don't think I have answered your specific question, but I am struggling to get what the aim is, sorry.
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
-
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
WordPress posts Title field inserts title into blog posts like a headline but doesn't ad H1 tag how to change?
I have a Wordpress website which is just using the Default theme, when I post in the blog, whatever I put in the "Title" field at the top of the editor is automatically is placed within the body of the blog post, like a headline, but it doesn't include any H1 tags that I can see. If I add my own headline within in the blog editor, it still inserts the Title like a headline. I am using the Yoast SEO Plugin and also write the meta title there, should I just leave the Wordpress title field blank so it doesn't insert into the blog post? Or is that inserted Title being recognized as an H1 even though I don't see h1 tags anywhere? Hope this isn't too confusing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO4leagalPA1 -
How to change URL structure in google webmasters
Is there any way to ask google to indexed the website in following URL structure abc.com/category/postname (I have this structure on my website) But Currently google indexed my website posts as - abc.com/postname/category How I can tell google to follow the right structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Merging B2B site with B2C site
Hi, A mobile phone accessory client of ours has a retail site (B2C) and a trade site (B2B). The retail site does pretty well and ranks highly for a number of terms. The trade site doesn't really rank for anything as they don't optimise it. They would like to merge the two sites and allow trade customers to log-in and purchase goods in bulk for their business. If they were to merge the trade site into the already successful consumer site, what would be the best way of doing this and what, if any, implications would it have on the organic visibility of the B2C site? Would it be possible to target retail and trade customers on one website? Cheers, Lewis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Visibility for https://goo.gl/gJH7eh
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if anyone can help me with the following. At the start of May this year we really lost visibility for the homepage of this site https://goo.gl/gJH7eh. This was particularly noticeable by tracking rankings for the term 'oak furniture'. We previously ranked on page 1 for the term 'oak furniture', but since May the homepage has struggled to make the top 100 positions for this term. We're confident that we have done everything within Google's guidelines, but it seems something is really holding the homepage back. The site ranks on page 1 for 'oak furniture' on Bing. The site had previously had a manual penalty for unnatural links (warning received several years ago). These links had a particular emphasis on using the anchor text 'oak furniture'. When we took over the site we did an extensive link clean up and disavow and managed to get the penalty removed at the end of October 2013. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OFS0 -
Drip Feeding Free Top 10 Blog Sites for Link Building?
Is it a good move to pick 10 free blogging sites to build links. Like drip feeding them. Let's say 10 blogging sites irrespective of its a sub-domain as we get in wordpress or a sub-folder blog as we get in livejournal. Now adding articles related to my money website on those blogs newly created & building links from them. Then drip feeding them by putting 1 article a month at regular intervals with anchor as links in each of them. Do you think its a good move?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Site migration from non canonicalized site
Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0