Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
-
Hi all,
Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep).
In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt).
Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages.
As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain.
Thanks!
-
I posted a bit of a Reddit rant here under my personal SEO alias of "studiumcirclus":
(click "View Entire Discussion")
Mainly these things vex me about the platform:
"In basic terms, Shopify is limited by its vision. They want to make sites easy to design for the average-joe, which means they have to spend most of their platform dev time on the back-end of the system and not the front-end of the sites which it produces
_ If they're always bogged down making extra tick-boxes to change things in the back-end, how can they be keeping up with cutting edge SEO? With WordPress you have a much larger dev community making add-ons, many of them completely free and still very effective. Because everyone is on WP, when new Google features, directives or initiatives come out they are quickly embraced (putting all sites on WP one step ahead)_
_ With smaller dev communities, platforms like Shopify or Magento lag behind. Why do people always expect that 'average' will rank 'well'? Ahead of the curve ranks well, average ranks averagely_
_ Also Shopify has some nasty Page-Speed issues which they won't acknowledge and they just argue about instead of fixing things. It's just not good for SEO_"
Other "Shopify is bad" evidence:
https://moz.com/community/q/main-menu-duplication#reply_391855 - just contains some of my thoughts on why Shopify isn't that good
https://moz.com/community/q/site-crawl-status-code-430 - a relatively recent problem someone had with their Shopify site, scroll down to see my reply
https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-in-shopify-subsequent-pages-in-collections - someone else having tech issues with their Shopify site. While my answer was probably right, they probably couldn't implement the fixes
-
This was incredibly helpful. Right now their funnel starts on the store (adding product to cart), but there's definitely a benefit to it starting on the main domain to better track how the channels perform and overall user behavior.
-
In summary - firstly echo effectdigital on Shopify. It is an interesting platform sold very well by Shopify zealots - but we have had to bend too many times to Shopify platform limitations to believe it is the right answer for most. It is awesome if your a bikini start-up with no CRM or ERP - however the moment it comes to a decent integration - it often gets ugly quickly.
On to your query - the shortened version to the answer is no-one knows. Why? because the algorithm treats subdomains differently for different sites. https://moz.com/blog/interview-searchlove There is a good piece on subdomains v subfolders in this WBF. In summary a good discussion on subdomains.
The click through to the subdomain should be a normal step, ie so assuming on the subdomain your landing on the relevant contextual page within the funnel to transact. That is normal for some back ends. You are correct ideally in my view all on the root domain.
Overall if the subdomain pages are critical and you want to rank, then need to treat subdomain for SEO as a separate site. However, if the subdomain is just the end part of the sales funnel.. then may not need to rank..
Hope that is helpful.
Regards
-
One reason we got out of shopify. Gets complicated quickly. There was a brilliant WBF on subdomains about 2 months ago - by the british dude from distilled who pops up from time to time. Will try and find it if get time, but would check that out as a starting point.
-
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out the best way to present to them all the pertinent information regarding how terrible Shopify is. The way they use Collections then block any sort of parameters in their unalterable Robots.txt file is insane.
-
That sounds like a hell of a mess. Instead of tying your name to one proposed implementation and saying "yes, this IS the way" - I'd get the complexity of the issue across to the client / boss
I'd then present your idea and say "I want to test this, but if results suffer we will need to revert the changes". I think that with such a complex architectural nightmare (on a HORRIBLE platform like Shopify, which is just awful for SEO) - it would be extremely foolish to charge off into the night without making the risks clear
The best practice is really to not have built such a terrible site to begin with. In making things better, there may be growing pains. There may be NO options which would result in 100% growth and 0% losses
My recommendation would be to continue blocking Google's access to the original, default product variations (as those are already happily ranking on the main site. Don't fix what ain't broken). I might allow Google to crawl the sub-variations which are inaccessible from the main site. I might alter the main site's UX to include links to the sub-variants on the 'shop.' subdomain
In the end though, it's a very tangled web they have spun
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
-
Keywords in URL: sub-directory or single layer keywords?
Hi guys, im putting together a proposal for a new site and trying to figure out if it'd be better to (A) have a keyword split across multiple directories or duplicate keywords to have the keyword hyphenated? For example, for the topic of "Christmas decor" would you use; (A) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Decor (B) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Christmas-Decor in example B the phrase 'Christmas' is duplicated which looks a little spammy, but the key term "Christmas decor" is in the URL without being broken up by directories. which is stronger? Any advice welcome! Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JAR8971 -
Should I use change of address when moving to subdomain
Hi guys So we had a domain that was only for one country, www.example.com 1 year later we decided to go to another country so we will have all the current website under a country subdomain like : ae.example.com we did a 301 redirect
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awrikat
Should I perform a change of address action from www.example.com to ae.example.com ? please help
Thanks0 -
Keyword Phrases - Can You Break Them Up?
Can you break up a search query across a sentence and have Google still recognize which query you are targeting? Let's say I'm trying to rank a page for the phrase "best haircuts calgary". Is Google's algorithm advanced enough to look at page title "Best Haircuts - Where To Get Them In Calgary" and know it's targeting the query "best haircuts calgary"? If it can't do this right now, I could see it advancing to this at some point in the future, which would then change the game quite a bit in terms of how creative you can get creating pages for queries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?
Hi guys I look after a festival website whose program changes year in and year out. There are a handful of mainstay events in the festival which remain each year, but there are a bunch of other events which change each year around the mainstay programming.This often results in us redoing the website each year (a frustrating experience indeed!) We don't archive our past festivals online, but I'd like to start doing so for a number of reasons 1. These past festivals have historical value - they happened, and they contribute to telling the story of the festival over the years. They can also be used as useful windows into the upcoming festival. 2. The old events (while no longer running) often get many social shares, high quality links and in some instances still drive traffic. We try out best to 301 redirect these high value pages to the new festival website, but it's not always possible to find a similar alternative (so these redirects often go to the homepage) Anyway, I've noticed some festivals archive their content into a subdirectory - i.e. www.event.com/2012 However, I'm thinking it would actually be easier for my team to archive via a subdomain like 2012.event.com - and always use the www.event.com URL for the current year's event. I'm thinking universally redirecting the content would be easier, as would cloning the site / database etc. My question is - is one approach (i.e. directory vs. subdomain) better than the other? Do I need to be mindful of using a subdomain for archival purposes? Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos20300 -
Subdomain for every us state?
Hi, one of our clients has an idea of making subdomains from his main website to sell his online advertisements in all states in USA. f.e: texas.web.com atlanta.web.com He wants to have a subdomain for every state and there to be information related only or mainly to this state? I am not sure about is this a good idea? What is your opinion about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vladokan0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Partner Login as subdomain?
Hi MozTeam, We have a website that is used as our partner login for our Partners to see their stats, but it is located on a SEPARATE domain from our main corporate website. We currently have thousands of people logging into the external portal every month, which we are obviously not getting good SEO credit for. I am considering bringing the entire login portal into our main corporate website, so that Google sees how popular and useful our site becomes when thousands more people are visiting... We only get a few thousands organic visits to the corporate site per month and about 3x that to the partner login portal. This is why I originally thought we could benefit from bringing it into our corporate site. Challaneges: our website is in .asp but we are launching a new version of it next month, switching it to Wordpress and into .php....but the current partner login website is still in .asp! Questions: 1. How will bringing this site into the main corporate site benefit us as far as SEO? 2. What is the proper way to combine an .asp site with a .php site? 3. If we have to use an iFrame because we can't mix the two languages, will that affect our SEO benefit? Pls advise, as if this is actually a good idea, I'd like to get it launched along with the site redesign that is currently under way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DerekM880 -
Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?
Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon, thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos0