Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
-
I'm looking for some clarity...
Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop.
The following are points to consider when responding
- The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized.
- There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on.
- There is roughly 2000 products
- Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration
- We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed
Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself.
Should we really be considering this path?
The domain is diveidc.com
One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner.
We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
-
Yes, all good insight.
We are the developers/agency for the client...and we are only considering this option purely on budget reasons. There is a lot of work to address the move to a new CMS, we require stronger content with the move and on top of it all we have to integrate all content to the new CMS....this equates to a treamedeous amount of work...not the best argument but again, posting this in seomoz allows us to have a nice sounding board.
The current CMS is so poorly geared for today's seo strategies that migration to another CMS is 100% required. Moving hosts isn't the problem. The CMS is.
To illustrate how pour the current CMS is, we can't even touch the root .htaccess file to redirect WWW. Doing so breaks the entire CMS system, insane. Thus we have www.mysite.com and mysite.com directly competing against each other, duplicate content etc. That's just 1 issue of many.
Moving to a new CMS is required, but with this move we have budget constraints wrapped in a very big site, wrapped around seo migration issues, wrapped in making things painless for the client, wrapped in making this all work.
We're looking for any insights knowing very well best practices...but having to deal with the reality of budgets. This could end up being "save a penny today, costs big bucks later".
We understand this is our unique issue and we may have to bite the bullet a bit, go with something like Cart66 and work through the bugs knowing the light at the end of the tunnel will be a brilliant seo/business solution for the client...but may take some painful hours getting there...hours we may have to suck up to keep a happy client and a relationship we've nurtured for some years.
-
What isn't so clear is that 2 years down the road this may be a really bad decision that was made just on budget.
I agree.
You never know how google is going to treat a subdomain.... but I have very few doubts about how they are going to treat a folder on my site.
So, if I was in the situation that you are in... I would move hosts, or change developers, or find something besides Shopify... to run a website that has the highest present and long-term probability to be as highly competitive as possible.
I work really really hard to compete for rankings.. I am not going to let a host, a shopping cart or a developer screw it up.
It's pretty easy to find new hosts, new developers and new shopping carts when you compare that to the huge job of getting 500 new unique domains to link to a store. We are comparing issues of convenience to those that are jugular.
Just me sayin' how I look at this.
-
Yes, we're definitively very aware of this...I'm hoping this post just gives us more brain power to the conversation we're already having internally as an agency knowing we will be loosing a treamedous amount of PR due to products currently being housed within the main domain but knowing that we have to migrate the site out of the existing CMS and go to Wordpress and most likely be using Shopify due to various reasons, mainly around Wordpress and Ecom not playing so hot together and a 3rd party provider (Shopify) cuts a lot of the de-bug work out of the picture allowing us to focus the budget on a content strategy more than build/de-bug time.
To give a bit more of a insight to the type of items the clients website currently caters to. There are 2 sales funnels, one being products and another being services. The products are all scuba dive equipment and the services are all local scuba courses. Currently the site ranks well in a local market for both, however services only ranks well locally while products tend to do much better regionally.
Ranking locally for services is fine, since you can't be in New York and take a scuba course being offered in Vancouver. But, people do query "scuba dive courses" globally and if we get the content strategy right the clients rank will go up regardless of the services being local or not which will benefit products or anything else on the site and vice versa.
Now, going ecom with Wordpress isn't fun. There's no real bullet proof solution that doesn't require some serious elbow grease to get the kinks worked out. Drupal isn't an option for budget reasons. Knowing this we are leaning towards Shopify, a rented solution that offsets some of the headache allowing us to focus on content strategy more than the build and bettering the seo of the overal site and shop...it feels like s safe bet.
I also read that search engines are a bit more aware of what you are doing with subdomains especially when the content you segmenet in to the subdomain is 1 type of content. movies.mysite.com for instance tells search engines it's 1 type of content...so shop.mysite.com essentially says "it's all products 24/7" and we start to focus 2 strategies, metrics and marketing. 1) for the products subdomain and 2) for the services. Sucks we can't cross-share the love, but lead-gen pages may be able to compensate for this as well as other content strategies we would put in place.
What isn't so clear is that 2 years down the road this may be a really bad decision that was made just on budget.
Just a train of thought...
-
I have one concern.
There is a big difference in ranking potential between store.domain.com and domain.com/store/
With domain.com/store/ the pages in the store benefit from the authority and linkpower accumulated by the main website. However, with store.domain.com the benefit is much less.
That alone would have me reject a solution that requires moving the store to a subdomain.
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
-
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Migration Challenge Question
I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands. Right now we have two website, lets call them: www.parentcompanyalpha.com www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com. Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com. But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off. So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com. So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched). Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com. What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible? The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score. I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go? I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com? Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Technical SEO
Where can I find knowledge of enhanced and technical SEO for all type of websites ( mainly E-Commerce)? Please share some good sources (PDFs, Videos, Checklist etc)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Tips for quick SEO
Hi guys (first time posting). I'm involved in many differnt marketing activities on an ecommerce site and don't always get a lot of time to focus on SEO (although I appreciate its importance). What are your tips for the most effective SEO tasks to focus on considering these time constraints? Think 80/20 applied to SEO. Thanks. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Links from a website or a subdomain, which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO?
I have a customer who just bought a domain (and the full website) of a competitor and decided that they will no longer update the website purchased. The website of my client has a Domain Authority = 50 and DA of the website purchased is 45. Each of them was registered by different companies and are on different servers too.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marciofelias
The reason for my message is that by being registered by different companies and are in differrent servers I can use the site purchased as a way to make link building to the main website (one way link buiding only from the website purchased to the main website), but I can put the website purchased as a subdomain of the main website and agregate content to the main website.
In your opinion which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO to the main website? Links from the website purchased or put this website as a subdomain to the main website?0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Migrating a very large site
hello, we are thinking about changing imageworksstudio.com to imageworkscreative.com we have TONS of of pages and want to make sure that our Page Rank and Rankings are maintained. Are there any best practices or specific guides for redirecting for such a large site (which already has a bunch of redirects in place in the first place) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900