A Blog Structure Dilemma We're Facing...
-
We're launching a pretty large content program (in the form of a blog) and have a structure issue:
Big fans of Wordpress for efficiency reasons, but our platform doesn't allow hosting of a wordpess (or other 3rd party) blog on the primary domain where we want it. site.com/blog
Here are the options:
1. Sub-domain: We can easily put it there. Benefit is we use the efficient Wordpress tools and very fast to setup etc. Downside is that the root domain won't get benefit of any backlinks to the blog (as far as I understand). I also don't believe the primary domain will benefit from the daily fresh/unique content the blog offers.
2. Custom Rig: We could create our own manual system of pages on the site to look just like our blog would. This would allow us to have it at site.com/blog and benefit from any backlinks and fresh content. The downside is that it won't be as efficient to manage.
3. External Site: Create a different site just for the blog. Same issue as the sub-domain I believe.
User Experience is a top priority, and all of the above pretty much can accomplish the same UX goal, with #3 requiring a some additional strategy on positioning.
Is #1 of #3 going to be a big regret down the road though, and is the backlink/content benefit clearly worth doing #2?
(correct me if I'm wrong on my assumptions with #1 but at least with the backlinks I'm almost certain that's the case)
Many thanks for your inputs on this.
-
Matt Cutts
Subdomains vs. Subdirectories What's the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren't major differences between the two, so when you're making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/01/feeling-lucky-at-pubcon.html
Deb, it really is a pretty personal choice. For something small like a blog, it probably won’t matter terribly much. I used a subdirectory because it’s easier to manage everything in one file storage space for me. However, if you think that someday you might want to use a hosted blog service to power your blog, then you might want to go with blog.example.com just because you could set up a CNAME or DNS alias so that blog.example.com pointed to your hosted blog service. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
-
I also noticed that the sitelinks often include links from subdomains.
And Matt Cutts has said its a personal choice, and GWMB states it makes no difference to them.
I have had good results so far with Sub Domains, I remeber asking you for advice about a year or 2 ago. you recommended good linking between sub and root domains to show the connection.
i have followed that advice, and the sitelinks for my sites in google reflect the subdomians as sub categories of the root.
so i am convinced subdomains act like subfolders, at least they have so far for me.
-
Great idea -- and the link Scot posted is perfect. However our platform doesn't give us access to mod_proxy or htaccess, so we are unable to setup the reverse proxy. unfortunately. Sigh.
-
Agreed - Google is consolidating subdomain links in Google Webmaster Tools, but as far as I know, that does not reflect a change in how the algorithm works. Subdomains can still fragment and split link-juice. The change is more of an accounting trick, for lack of a better word.
-
Thanks, Hugh! I'm in the same boat as SEOPA with 3dcart and this seems like the best solution.
This post by Slingshot SEO seems relevant (What is a Reverse Proxy and How Can it Help My SEO?).
-
Hm. Right, I think I have another suggested solution of sorts - it's tricksy and you'd need an expert to set it up, but it'd solve your problems.
In short, if you run a reverse proxy serving your site itself on a server which ISN'T your BigCommerce server, you can tell it to fetch your main site for your www.yourdomain.com URL, and your blog (live, not cached) for www.yourdomain.com/blog. Probably your best option would be to use a reverse proxy like Varnish or Nginx, both of which are normally used for performance reasons - however, they can also be used to effectively "combine" two servers into one.
So, you'd move your DNS record to point to the reverse proxy, then set the proxy up to fetch content from your ecommerce site and your blog site.
Issues:
-
You'd need another server, and you'd need root access and an expert sysadmin to set it all up.
-
I don't know how well BigCommerce would handle a reverse proxy - but frankly, they SHOULD be able to handle it OK if you talk to their sysadmins.
Advantages:
- This would also give you massive redundancy in case of high traffic - reverse proxy setups are usually used to improve performance. You'd be Digg-proof!
It's complex, but I can see it working! Just another suggestion.
More info on reverse proxies - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy
-
-
Hm. It seems to me that you've just got a routing issue - there MUST be a way to fix this.
Can you run a mod_rewrite .htaccess or similar on the server?
-
It's a platform issue. BigCommerce. Everything else has been fantastic with them, but our only option for WordPress is to host on a subdomain.
The clear answer is that having it in a directory is better, but doing so means we need to have a very manual setup and lose the efficiencies/functionality of wordpress.
-
No opinion here.
In late 2010 we redirected to popular subdomains to folders in the root. The results have been kickass. Kickass.
-
Here is a post from earlier in the year with a similar discussion (didn't see that one before I posted this). Also looks like similar differences of opinion, though some more sources sited. http://www.seomoz.org/q/corporate-blog
Because of the lack of consensus, I'm curious to research more. Just want to make sure I/we didn't miss anything over the past few months.
-
The problem with this idea, it occurs to me on second thoughts, will be comments. Having dynamically user-generated content will be tricky with this workaround.
Aside from that, rsync and W3TC are both enterprise-level stable solutions, so it SHOULD work - but I agree, it's doing something new, and new's always a bit risky.
Would you be able to go into any detail as to why you can't host WP? Is it a hosting company issue, a platform language issue, or something else?
-
James: do you have a source for the statement that Google now treats subs as a key site element?
-
Interesting. I need to research this more. It sounds like it's prone to errors, but maybe not.
-
If I could not have the blog that is going to receive massive work in a subfolder I would be looking for a different platform for the site or a different method of creating the blog.
Placing that blog on a subdomain or on a satelite site is like tossing away great content imo.
-
Google now treats sub domains as a key element of the site
[citation needed]
Though I know you're talking about - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html
However, as far as I'm aware, there's no information yet as to how Google are changing the weighting of these links (or even if they are), so I'd still be wary of charging ahead with a subdomain
-
Can you rsync or otherwise automatically copy content onto your primary web server? If so, there may be a way to combine the best of all worlds.
Set up your Wordpress platform somewhere else - doesn't matter where. Make sure Google isn't crawling it to avoid duplicate content penalties.Install a caching solution like W3 Total Cache which writes the entire blog as static HTML to the disk.
Now, have a frequently-updating automatic synchronisation tool copy those files from the location on your blog server to the local directory on your web server corresponding to yourdomain.com/blog . Set up the same rewrite rules on your main server as W3TC uses on your blog server.
You should now have an automatically-updated static copy of your blog hosted under yourdomain.com/blog . As a bonus, it'll be fast as hell and stable as a large room full of horses.
The actual setup's a bit of a faff, but my (non-pro SEO) intuition is that it'll be the best solution SEO-wise.
-
Thanks for the input, James. Agreed on the external site. I didn't know about subs being treated as a key element now. So other sites linking to posts on the blog (if the blog is on blog.site.com) will still benefit the primary domain?
Having it in a folder is doable, but more difficult to manage ongoing. I think it's a question of 'how much better' is it to have at site.com/blog...
-
If you can not get it onto a sub folder ie site.com/blog then the next best is to have it on a sub domain blog.site.com
Google now treats sub domains as a key element of the site, yet sub folders work better for internal linking.
I would not put it on an external site.
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
-
Essential to Have a Blog to Rank Well?
I have noticed that several competitors that rank very well rarely update their blogs, www.42floors.com for instance. We are redesigning our commercial real estate Wordpress website in the hopes of improving traffic, ranking and conversions. How critical is it to invest resources on creating and categorizing blog posts? Is frequently updating a blog post less necessary in late 2018? Curious to hear how much effort we should take to create new blog content and whether or not it will assist us in a competitive niche. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan12 -
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
What sort of content for 'non-niche' website?
Hey guys, had a question with regards to content production. We run an store called Yellow Octopus in Australia and we've literally got thousands of products (4500 skus last count). We've got everything from novelty mugs to kitchen accessories to gag gifts, t-shirts and tech gadgets. I've read a lot of material on creating awesome content to attract backlinks and we are ready to craft our content strategy. We've got a team in place - graphic designer, illustrator and writers to execute that strategy. It's just a matter of formulating the strategy! Largely speaking I have an idea of the quality of content required because I look at a lot of it. The real issue is what type of content is right for us? Most of the articles I have read focus on niche industries i.e. SEO, Piano sales or health foods. Right off the bat I can come up with hundreds of content pieces that work around those niches. However, with such a diverse range of products I'm unsure of what our niche really is, in fact not having a niche is almost our niche. Of course we could do gift guides like '30 Unbelievable Gifts for Foodies' (and we do, do those). However they aren't really the type of posts that are likely to attract back-links. Is the best strategy to split the content into categories? What sort of content pieces would you suggest for a company such as ours? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization
I know about Keyword Cannibalization, so I understand why it's generally a problem. If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google has to "guess" which one to display (as I understand it, unless you have a SUPER influential page you won't get both pages showing up on the SERP). To explain why I'm not sure if this applies to our page, we have a blog that we write about employment law issues on. So we might have 20 blog posts over the past year that all talk about recent pregnancy discrimination lawsuits employers might be interested in. Now, searching the Google Keyword tools, there aren't even close to 20 different focus keywords that would make any sense. "Pregnancy Discrimination lawsuit" is niche enough for us to be competitive, but anything more specific than that simply has very little search activity. My suggestion is to just optimize all of them for "pregnancy discrimination lawsuit". My understand of how Panda works is that if the content is different on each page (and it is!) then it will only display what it guesses is the most relevant "NLRB" post, but any link juice sent to the other 19 "NLRB" posts would still boost the relevancy for whatever post Google chooses. And it wouldn't get dinged as keyword stuffing because it's clearly not just the same page repeated over and over. I've found quite a few articles on Keyword Cannibalization but many are pre-Panda. I was CERTAIN I'd seen a post that explained my idea is a totally viable and good one, but of course now I can't find it. So before I go full steam ahead with this strategy I just want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CEDRSolutions0 -
Alt tag for src='blank.gif' on lazy load images
I didn't find an answer on a search on this, so maybe someone here has faced this before. I am loading 20 images that are in the viewport and a bit below. The next 80 images I want to 'lazy-load'. They therefore are seen by the bot as a blank.gif file. However, I would like to get some credit for them by giving a description in the alt tag. Is that a no-no? If not, do they all have to be the same alt description since the src name is the same? I don't want to mess things up with Google by being too aggressive, but at the same time those are valid images once they are lazy loaded, so would like to get some credit for them. Thanks! Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Wordpress blog in a subdirectory not being indexed by Google
HI MozzersIn my websites sitemap.xml, pages are listed, such as /blog/ and /blog/textile-fact-or-fiction-egyptian-cotton-explained/These pages are visible when you visit them in a browser and when you use the Google Webmaster tool - Fetch as Google to view them (see attachment), however they aren't being indexed in Google, not even the root directory for the blog (/blog/) is being indexed, and when we query:site: www.hilden.co.uk/blog/ It returns 0 results in Google.Also note that:The Wordpress installation is located at /blog/ which is a subdirectory of the main root directory which is managed by Magento. I'm wondering if this causing the problem.Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!AnthonyToTOHuj.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
Re-Direct Users But Don't Affect Googlebot
This is a fairly technical question... I have a site which has 4 subdomains, all targeting a specific language. The brand owners don't want German users to see the prices on the French sub domain and are forcing users into a re-direct to the relevant subddomain, based on their IP address. If a user comes from a different country, (ie the US) they are forced on the UK sub domain. The client is insistent on keeping control of who sees what (I know that's a debate in it's own right), but these re-directs we're implementing to make that happen, are really making it difficult to get all the subdomains indexed as I think googlebot is also getting re-directed and is failing to do it's job. Is there are a way of re-directing users, but not Googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
What's the best .NET blog solution?
I asked our developers to implement a WordPress blog on our site and they feel that the technology stack that is required to support WP will interfere with a number of different .NET production applications on that server. I can't justify another server just because of a blog either. They want me to find a .NET blog solution. The only thing that looks decent out there is dotnetblogengine.net. Has anyone had any experience with this tool or any others like it? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles1