E-commerce solution and subdomain issues
-
Hello All,
In light of Wil Reynold's closing keynote at Portland's Searchfest, I thought I might try posting here to get some advice. We run a family business on the side and we're looking at starting to use volusion.com for our e-commerce solution. The catch is we currently have a wordpress site summitmining.com running on thesis with great SEO. Ranking #1 & #2 for our highest trafficked terms.Ideally, I'd like Summitmining.com to direct to the Volusion store and then summitmining.com/blog to go to our wordpress installation BUT since the volusion site will be hosted with the company and they will not host our wordpress installation we'd have to use a subdomain instead of a subdirectory which I understand will be bad for SEO.
Does anyone have any recommendation on how to set this up without totally screwing up our ranking OR any recommendations of an easy to use shopping cart (I've worked on a magento site before and it's too complex for us) that wouldn't require a separate or subdomain?
Thank you so much!
-Cherie Prochaska
503-816-3557
[email protected]
@cherieprochaska -
I've not run into any issues hosting WP on an IIS server. I expect that it's either a known compatibility issue with whatever IIS version your host is running, or they're simply unfamiliar with it and avoiding potential support problems.
My main site is all written in ASP and I plugged a WP blog onto the site in just a few minutes, with really no configuration issues. I'm hosting that site at Arvixe.com.
-
Hello Cherie,
You're probably already aware that it is possible to install WP in a subdirectory: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory . The problem, as Syed mentioned below, probably has something to do with Volusion being on ASP.net and Wordpress requiring a Linux/PHP host. In my experience, just about every decision you make going forward will be more difficult to get done if you go with an ASP.net site because a lot will revolve around having someone use Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI).
It is possible to set up the WP site on another host, but if you found Magento too complex, this might not be the best way to go either:
Can I ask why you want to move if your rankings good and business is going well? There are probably a lot of improvements you could make with the help of a good Wordpress developer.
If you really must move over to Volusion and want to keep the WP blog, this may be one of those times when the "Put your blog on your primary domain" rule of thumb is put aside for an exception.
-
I imagine it has something to do with IIS compatiblity issue with Wordpress/ PHP. Your host might have to spend $10k or so to get the latest IIS to make it compatible with PHP and that's my best guess as to why they won't do it.
Here is a link for the IIS compatbility with PHP, it helps: http://php.iis.net/
My recommendation for an easy to use simple shopping cart is OpenCart. I find it much simpler than Magento and has a host of features that most webmasters would be content with. The script is free but if you want more advanced options/ features, you can get those 'extensions' for $5-99. The script is easy to work on and customize.
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
-
Bloking pages in roborts.txt that are under a redirected subdomain
Hi Everyone, I have a lot of Marketo landing pages that I don't want to show in SERP. Adding the noindex meta tag for each page will be too much, I have thousands of pages. Blocking it in roborts.txt could have been an option, BUT, the subdomain homepage is redirected to my main domain (with a 302) so I may confuse search engines ( should they follow the redirect or should they block) marketo.mydomain.com is redirected to www.mydomain.com disallow: / (I think this will be confusing with the redirect) I don't have folders, all pages are under the subdomain, so I can't block folders in Robots.txt also Would anyone had this scenario or any suggestions? I appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi, A client of ours has one URL for the moment (https://aalst.mobilepoint.be/) and wants to create a second one with exactly the same content (https://deinze.mobilepoint.be/). Will that mean Google punishes the second one because of duplicate content? What are the recommendations?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
How can you avoid duplicate content within your own e-commerce website
One of the e-commerce websites I am working on is giving me a lot of duplicate content errors because all of the products are the same, just different sizes. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem or should i just ignore it? Someone in the office brought up the idea to just use an i frame for all product descriptions. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Avoiding duplicate content with national e-commerce products and localized vendors
Hello 'mozzers! For our example purposes, let's say we have a national cog reseller, www.cogexample.com, focusing on B2C cog sales. The website's SEO efforts revolve around keywords with high search volumes -- no long tail keywords here! CogExample.com sells over 35,000 different varieties of cogs online, broken into search engine friendly categories and using both HTML and Meta pagination techniques to ensure adequate deep-linking and indexing of their individual product pages. With their recent fiscal success, CogExample.com has signed 2,500 retailers across the United States to re-sell their cogs. CogExample.com's primary objective is B2C online sales for their highly-sought search terms, ie "green cogs". However, CogExample.com also wants their retailers to show up for local/geo search; ie "seattle green cogs". The geo/location-based retailer's web-content will be delivered from the same database as the primary online store, and thus is very likely to cause duplicate content issues. Questions 1. If the canonical meta tag is used to point the geo-based product to the online primary product, the geo-based product will likely be placed in the supplementary indexed. Is this correct? 2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty? 3. Google product feeds will be used to localize content and feed Google's product search. Is this "enough" to garnish sizable amounts of traffic and/or retain SERP ranks?
Technical SEO | | CatalystSEM0 -
Duplicate Content Issue within the Categories Area
We are in the process of building out a new website, it has been built in Drupal. Within the scan report from SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics and it look like I have a duplicate content issue. Example: We sell Vinyl Banners so we have many different templates one can use from within our Online Banner Builder Tool. We have broken them down via categories: Issue: Duplicate Page Content /categories/activities has 9 other URLS associated this issue, I have many others but this one will work for an example. Within this category we have multiple templates attached to this page. Each of the templates do not need their own page however we use this to pull the templates into one page onto the activities landing page. I am wondering if I need to nofollow, noindex each of those individule templates and just get the main top level category name indexed. Or is there a better way to do this to minimize the impact of Panda?
Technical SEO | | Ben-HPB0 -
Any issues with lots of pages issuing 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on a site redesign and it is possible the new site could issue a lot of 301 redirects as we may migrate from one forum solution to another. Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | nickswan0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0