Effect on SEO for e-commerce on a different domain?
-
We are engaging a vendor to host our LMS and the process for purchasing access to the LMS (product pages/checkout). The vendor can only accomplish this by domain masking (redirecting portal.ourdomain.com to a subdomain on their domain).
Our concern is the SEO implication. Obviously we would prefer the content hosted in a subfolder on our domain for the best SEO outcome, but this isn't an option.
The vendor's domain authority is considerably lower than our own, but they recommend moving our product pages, which are currently hosted on our primary domain, to their subdomain so the checkout process is fully integrated using their product. Several of our product pages rank in the top 10 on Google and we don't want to lose that.
Does anyone have any experience with domain masking and maintaining page rank? My inclination is that moving these high-ranking pages will 1) Hurt our primary domain, and 2) Negatively effect the rank of our product pages.
Thanks in advance,
Beth
-
If your products are ranking well for their target keywords, I would try and avoid changing their URLs (especially to a different domain). Keeping on your own domain also helps improve your product rankings when you grow your main website.
Not sure how the masking will be set up, but in some cases there is no "internal links" since they are all masked by the root masking domain. This would definitely prevent you from building more links (and further improving your rankings).
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
-
SEO - Massive duplication of same page, but different link.
Hi!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennisprints
I'm dealing with a big client who's site has a big (approx. 39 000) duplication of the "same" page (same content) but each page has a different URL. The duplicated page is a "become a member"-page.
I've checked the backlinks in Google Search Console and there are no sites linking to any of the duplicated pages.
The developers have no clue where or how the pages came to be duplicated, but my guess is that every time a new customer sets up an account the page becomes duplicated. The customer want us to just remove the pages and sort out the duplication, but removing the pages might cause a big drop in back links/traffic and what not. I would much rather redirect the duplicated pages to the original page, but given that there are 39 000 pages it might mess with the site speed. Looking for ideas and suggestions of what the next step should be, remove or redirect.
Thanks so much!0 -
Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing The situation is as follow: For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them. Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven87
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.com So I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are: no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages) duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client) impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console. Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google. Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of? The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected. So my questions basically are: 1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed?0 -
Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer0 -
Changing Domain Host and Potential SEO Effects
Hi Community, We are currently thinking of changing our domain hosting package and I am wondering if that could have any effects on rankings, SEO, etc. The thing here is that we aren't changing the hosting provider, we are only changing the package from the same provider. Most of the info I have found on the internet has been mostly about changing actual hosting providers versus packages from the same provider (if the makes sense). If anyone knows if this might affect our SEO and what steps we can take to safe guard against any potential pitfalls, please let us know. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Web domain hurt seo?
does having the "web" prefix in the domain name, such as in web.pennies.com/copper hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
Are prices shown in search results good for e-commerce sites?
Hello here. I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com) and with the fact we have implemented structured data for our product pages, now our search results on Google appear with pricing information whereas most of our competitors don't have that information displayed (yet). I am wondering: Do you think is that good? What side effects could that cause? Less CTR? Less bounce rate? Less traffic? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Bounce rate and average visit time in an e-commerce site
Dear all, I am managing a Belgian online pharmacy (www.pharma2go.be) . The online pharmacy has a quite high bounce rate (+/- 79%) and low avg. visit time (< 1 minute). This could somehow be related to a choices that have been made in the past to also build the site in English (but without English product texts available - only Dutch and French). The reason is that people all over Europe could order. Another reason could be that also product on prescription are shown which cannot be ordered. This was chosen to still offer the visitors the product leaflets as a service. I am wondering if it would be beneficial for SEO to remove the English version and the on prescription products. At least if this would lower bounce rate and increase the average visit time. Thanks for your input. Kindest regards, Stefaan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stefaanva0