E-commerce solution and subdomain issues
-
Hello All,
In light of Wil Reynold's closing keynote at Portland's Searchfest, I thought I might try posting here to get some advice. We run a family business on the side and we're looking at starting to use volusion.com for our e-commerce solution. The catch is we currently have a wordpress site summitmining.com running on thesis with great SEO. Ranking #1 & #2 for our highest trafficked terms.Ideally, I'd like Summitmining.com to direct to the Volusion store and then summitmining.com/blog to go to our wordpress installation BUT since the volusion site will be hosted with the company and they will not host our wordpress installation we'd have to use a subdomain instead of a subdirectory which I understand will be bad for SEO.
Does anyone have any recommendation on how to set this up without totally screwing up our ranking OR any recommendations of an easy to use shopping cart (I've worked on a magento site before and it's too complex for us) that wouldn't require a separate or subdomain?
Thank you so much!
-Cherie Prochaska
503-816-3557
cherie@c-squaredassociates.com
@cherieprochaska -
I've not run into any issues hosting WP on an IIS server. I expect that it's either a known compatibility issue with whatever IIS version your host is running, or they're simply unfamiliar with it and avoiding potential support problems.
My main site is all written in ASP and I plugged a WP blog onto the site in just a few minutes, with really no configuration issues. I'm hosting that site at Arvixe.com.
-
Hello Cherie,
You're probably already aware that it is possible to install WP in a subdirectory: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory . The problem, as Syed mentioned below, probably has something to do with Volusion being on ASP.net and Wordpress requiring a Linux/PHP host. In my experience, just about every decision you make going forward will be more difficult to get done if you go with an ASP.net site because a lot will revolve around having someone use Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI).
It is possible to set up the WP site on another host, but if you found Magento too complex, this might not be the best way to go either:
Can I ask why you want to move if your rankings good and business is going well? There are probably a lot of improvements you could make with the help of a good Wordpress developer.
If you really must move over to Volusion and want to keep the WP blog, this may be one of those times when the "Put your blog on your primary domain" rule of thumb is put aside for an exception.
-
I imagine it has something to do with IIS compatiblity issue with Wordpress/ PHP. Your host might have to spend $10k or so to get the latest IIS to make it compatible with PHP and that's my best guess as to why they won't do it.
Here is a link for the IIS compatbility with PHP, it helps: http://php.iis.net/
My recommendation for an easy to use simple shopping cart is OpenCart. I find it much simpler than Magento and has a host of features that most webmasters would be content with. The script is free but if you want more advanced options/ features, you can get those 'extensions' for $5-99. The script is easy to work on and customize.
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
-
Discovered - currently not indexed issue
Hello all, We have a sitemap with URLs that have mostly user generated content. Profile Overview section. Where users write about their services and some other things. Out of 46K URLs, only 14K are valid according to search console and 32K URLs are excluded. Out of these 32K, 28K are "Discovered - currently not indexed". We can't really update these pages as they have user generated content. However we do want to leverage all these pages to help us in our SEO. So the question is how do we make all of these pages indexable? If anyone can help in the regard, please let me know. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | akashkandari0 -
Crawler issues on subdomain - Need resolving?
Hey Guys, I'm fairly new to the world of SEO and have a ton of crawler issues with a friends website I'm doing some work on. After Moz did a site crawl I'm getting loads of errors (Total of 100+ for critical crawler, content and meta data). Most of these are due to broken social links on a subdomain - so my question is do I need to resolve all of the errors even if they are on a sub-domain? Will it affect the primary website? Thanks, Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
Duplicate content or Duplicate page issue?
Hey Moz Community! I have a strange case in front of me. I have published a press release on my client's website and it ranked right away in Google. A week after the page completely dropped and it completely disappeared. The page is being indexed in Google, but when I search "title of the PR", the only results I get for that search query are the media and news outlets that have reported the news. No presence of my client's page. I also have to mention that I found two URLs of the same page: one with lower case letters and one with capital letters. Is this a duplicate page or a duplicate content issue coming from the news websites? How can I solve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Workaholic0 -
Webmaster internal links issue
Hi All, In webmaster > Internal links https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/internal-links?hl=en&siteUrl= I get counts as in the image http://imgur.com/9bO5H0f is this logical and ok or should i work on finding why so many links and reduce them? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Creating unique SEO content for E-Commerce - worried about it being copied
Hi, So, we know we don't have the best content - so we are hiring writers to create unique content for each product. What happens if this is now copied by another website? What does Google see? Do they recognize us as the original content? Has anyone used DMCA.com ? is it worth it? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate content issues, I am running into challenges and am looking for suggestions for solutions. Please help.
So I have a number of pages on my real estate site that display the same listings, even when parsed down by specific features and don't want these to come across as duplicate content pages. Here are a few examples: http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html?feature=waterfront http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html This happens to be a waterfront community so all the homes are located along the waterfront. I can use a canonical tag, but I not every community is like this and I want the parsed down feature pages to get index. Here is another example that is a little different: http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=without-pool http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=4-bedrooms http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/winter-park/bear-gully-bay.html?feature=waterfront So all the listings in this community happen to have 4 bedrooms, no pool, and are waterfront. Meaning that they display for each of the parsed down categories. I can possible set something that if the listings = same then use canonical of main page url, but in the next case its not so simple. So in this next neighborhood there are 48 total listings as seen at: http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/windermere/isleworth.html and being that it is a higher end neighborhood, 47 of the 48 listings are considered "traditional listings" and while it is not exactly all of them it is 99%. Any recommendations is appreciated greatly.
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
WordPress E-Commerce Plugin Duplicate Content Problem
I am working on a wordpress website that uses the WP E-Commerce plugin. I am using the Yoast seo plugin but not totally familiar with it. I have noticed that WP E-Commerce creates duplicate content issues. Here's an example: http://www.domain.com/parent-category/product-url-1/ is the same content as http://www.domain.com/parent-category/child-category/product-url-1/. I was wondering which of these following options are the best solution: 1. 301 redirect the multiple instances to one page
Technical SEO | | theanglemedia
2. noindex all but one instance
3. Use the canonical tag (i've used this tag before for telling SE's to use the www version of a page but not sure if it's the appropriate for this)
4. a combination of one of these 3 options? Thanks in advance!0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0