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Hi

Having weighed up all the angles, it's time to bite the bullet and move our blog from a subdomain to a subfolder on our ecommerce store. But as someone new to SEO I am struggling to find the correct process for doing this properly for our situation. Can anyone help?

I have outlined what I have learned so far in 10 steps below to hopefully help you understand my situation, where I am at and what I am struggling with. Advice, tips and suggested further reading on all/any of the 10 points would be great.

Some quick background

The blog is on Wordpress, and on a subdomain of our store (blog.store.com). It is four years old, with 80 original posts we want to move to a subfolder of the store (store.com/blog).

The store has been built using BigCommerce, and has also been active for four years.

Both the blog and the store exist as properties within our Google Search Console.

The 10 steps required for the move, based on research so far, and the associated questions

1 Prepare new site: which I am guessing means reproducing all of the content over at the new subfolder location (store.com/blog)?

2 Setup errors for any pages not being transferred: I have no idea how to do this!

3 Make sure analytics is working for the new pages: it should be as the both the site the pages are moving to a subfolder of is already running with analytics and has been for years - is this a safe assumption?

4 Map all URLs being moved to their new counterparts: is this just record keeping? In a spreadsheet? Or is it a process I don't yet understand??

5 Add rel='cannonical' tags: while I understand the concept of these, I have no idea how to implement them properly here!

6 Create and save new sitemaps: as both the blog.store.com and store.com exist in Google Search Console already, can I just refresh the sitemap for store.com/blog once the subfolder is created to achive this?

7 Setup and test 301 redirects: these can be created in BigCommerce for the new pages in the store.com/blog subfolder, and will refer back to the blog.store.com URLs the pages came from - is this the right way to do this? I am still learning here and know enough to know how much this can matter, but not enough to fully grasp the intricacies of the process

8 Move URLs simultaneously: I have no idea what this means or how to achieve it! is this just for big site moves? Does it still apply to 80 blog posts shifting from a subdomain to a subfolder on the same root? If so, how?

9 Submit a change of address in Google Search Console: This looks simple enough although Google ominously warn:

‘Don't use this tool unless you are moving your primary website presence to a new address’

Which makes me wonder how simple it really is - my primary website in this case is the store, which is not moving. address But does 'primary' here simply mean the individual property with search console? I am going in circles on this one!

10 Configure the old blog on the subdomain to redirect people and engines to the new pages: I thought the 301 redirects and rel='cannonical' stuff did that already? What did I miss??

For anyone still here, thanks for making it this far and if you still have the energy left, any advice would be great!

Thanks

Hi Rob

That's a big sway in favour of shifting to the subfolder, and will absolutely take you up on your offer via PM, thanks very much

Hi Rob, thanks for the in-depth answer and resources, very helpful

I would love to shift our blog to a subfolder, but this may cause problems too. This is because our main store site is built with BigCommerce, meaning the only option to get the blog into a subfolder there is using BigCommerce's built-in blog functionality.

Good news: we have all of our blog content in a subfolder

Bad news: SEO functionality of the BigCommerce blog is average at best. Layout, navigation and UX is poor

Do you think the pros outweigh the cons?

The other alternative is to rebuild the store from the ground up for ecommerce and blogging and bring everything under one domain that way in a site optimised for both.

This is likely beyond our budget right now however. I don't see this being realistically possible for another 12 months. In the meantime I am searching for the best way to maximise the assets we have (blog, main site, etc) for max SEO benefit and growth over the next year.

All thoughts and advice greatly appreciated!

Hi

I am trying to determine how effective our store blog is and am trying to analyse the inbound links it provides to our store domain but am confused with the results, can anyone help please?

For information the blog is on a subdomain of the store site, has plenty of relevant original content, and has been regularly updated over several years in line with basic Yoast SEO best practice.

When I look at analysis of inbound links and linking domains for the store site in Moz Pro, the blog subdomain does not show as providing any inbound links.

Google Search Console shows similar results, with no inbound links to the store domain showing from the blog subdomain in either 'search traffic > links to your site', or 'search traffic > inbound links'.

Open Site Explorer for the store domain also shows no inbound links from the blog subdomain to the store with 'link source > only external' selected.

But if I change to 'link source > only internal' then all of the inbound links from the blog subdomain to the main store that I would expect to see appear.

Should I be concerned by the fact I can only find these inbound links under this one specific search and not in any of the others?

Does this suggest a problem in the passing of any current and future SEO benefit from subdomain blog to main domain?

Or should I not worry about it too much?

I am looking to begin a full overhaul of all SEO for the store and blog from the ground up and want to be sure the connections between the blog subdomain and store are functioning properly before I start.

Any help in unpicking this would be really appreciated

Thanks very much

Thanks again for the help here

In the longterm it seems a new website build for ecommerce and blog in one SEO-friendly arena, as opposed to the compromises we currently have, is a good idea. But that's beyond budget for now.

With a team all expertly versed and current in our niche, many of whom are former journalists, filmmakers or marketing creatives, content we can honestly do! SEO is the elephant in the room we are all now getting educated about so we can grow way faster, and employ good folks when we need them. Looks like our next stop is scouting out some expert help so we'll start here in Moz Q&A - are there any other places you recommend we look beyond here and Moz's own curated list?

Many thanks again for taking the time to help out, as I said before, this is a steep learning curve and without help from folks like you we'd still be at the bottom of it!

Hi, thanks for the answer

I had never known that without inbound links to the blog on a subdomain it would be all but dead in the water. Wow. Very useful to know.

So I am guessing you would recommend moving the blog to a subfolder?

As a small company we do not have the resources to actively drive links, etc to two sites. This means all activity in this area is focused on the store domain only. Moving the blog into a subfolder there would solve the issue of not having to boost two domains.

My concern with the subfolder is this would mean the blog would have to be run through BigCommerce's inbuilt blog platform which has a fraction of the SEO tools or layout options of a Wordpress blog. Do you think this loss is outweighed by the benefit of having the blog on a domain which has links already and is actively being developed to attract more?

Thanks very much for your help and if anyone else has any suggestions I am all ears - I have a lot to learn here!

Hi

I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin.

But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog.

My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it?

Further info:

1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains

2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015

3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here.

4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct.

An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue?

Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!