Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?
-
I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority?
Thanks.
-
Mike, there is a technical solution specifically for this situation that will give you the best of both worlds!
You're only considering moving the blog to a subdomain because you need to make management of the backend code more efficient and you're wondering how much of an SEO hit you'll have to accept in order to accomplish that. As EGOL says (and I fully concur), moving to a subdomain is going to do serious damage to the value of the both the primary site and the blog.
What you really want is to have the WordPress install elsewhere, but still have it show to visitors (and search engines) like it lives in the /ecommerce-blog subdirectory.
This is exactly what a reverse proxy is designed to do. It allows you to have the WordPress code installed on a subdomain, but still serve the pages to the visitor from the subdirectory as you have been doing. So to the user, the blog looks and works just as it does now, but the code is actually running off a subdomain.
This can be a little tricky to set up, but as long as you have reasonable control over your server, and an experienced server administrator, it's not all that difficult. Especially in your case as you're replicating an existing structure so you won't need a whole slew of redirects. In fact, a reverse proxy could even be used to house the WP install on a completely separate server if you really want to separate the code from the ecomm code.
If your site runs under the Apache webserver, reverse proxy is available as a fairly simple Apache module (it's the config that's tricky.) It's also doable under Windows/IIS but harder. (Note this typically can't be done on shared hosting, but as an ecomm site, I assume you're running on at least your own VPS server?) Here's a post from here on SEOMoz by PointBlankSeo for a little more background on reverse proxies.
Hoe that gives you a second option to consider?
Paul
-
If you have a kickass blog that attracts readers, links, likes, shares, etc., moving it to a subdomain will decrease the SEO value of the blog to your ecommerce rankings. Why? It will be on the subdomain where the link value is only partially shared with the root domain. So, rankings for both the blog and the store might fall. A couple years ago, I redirected all of my subdomains to folders in the root and the results were immediately kickass.
If you don't have a kickass blog it might not matter what you do since the blog really isn't an asset to the site that attracts readers, links, likes shares, etc. In that case maybe you should dump the blog or kick it in gear if you want to spend your time in a worthwhile way.
I value my blogs highly enough that I would dump an ecommerce system if it was stinking up my blog.
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
-
High charts, anyone used them? SEO impact/things to take into consideration
Hi there Moz Community, Our org is looking into implementing Highcharts, interactive charts on our website instead of having regular static chart images. I found this post recently about how Moz implemented them a while back, a couple years ago. https://moz.com/community/q/question-for-moz-developers-highcharts Moz made a pretty good case for them over alternatives. They would certainly keep people on the page longer, which is good, but is there anything else that I should take into account or think of before going ahead with this from an SEO perspective? Does anyone else have experience with them on their websites? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
SEO of blogging websites
What are the best practices of doing SEO of article/blogging websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Implications of Moving Blog to Subdomain
Hello, We are having some issues upgrading our stack and maintaining Wordpress for our blog. So we are thinking about splitting them up. What are the SEO implications of moving our blog to a subdomain? Our blog URL structure is currently something like https://www.aplossoftware.com/blog/p/2470/fund-accounting/yearend-closing-checklist/. We would like to change to something like https://blog.aplossoftware.com/p/2470/fund-accounting/yearend-closing-checklist/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stageagent0 -
Moving categories to new domain
Hello Mozzers , I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc). Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
ECommerce syndication & duplicate content
We have an eCommerce website with original software products. We want to syndicate our content to partner and affiliate websites, but are worried about the effect of duplicate content all over the web. Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products, with the exact same name, description, tags, etc. We read the wonderful and relevant post by Kate Morris on this topic (here: http://mz.cm/nXho02) and we realize the duplicate content is never the best option. Some concrete questions we're trying to figure out: 1. Are we risking penalties of any sort? 2. We can potentially get tens of thousands of links from this concept, all with duplicate content around them, but from PR3-6 sites, some with lots of authority. What will affect our site more - the quantity of mediocre links (good) or the duplicate content around them (bad)? 3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp0 -
How important is it to create a subdomain?
I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar success? Also, Panda aside, how important do you think it is to separate different types of content out on separate subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
All page files in root? Or to use directories?
We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /. For example: /aosta-valley-i6816.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html We are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories. For example, the above URLs would be the following: /images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html Would we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes? Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy? Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory: /images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/ If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/ Just looking for some clarity to our problem! Thank you for your help guys!0 -
SEO for Korea - Naver & Daum
Google and Yahoo have very little market penetration in the Korean markets. Instead, the popular search engines are Naver and Daum. Naver seems to like keeping traffic within its own network of sites. Does anyone have tips for what things might work to increase search visibility in Korea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | art-boy0