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
-
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
Google Webmaster Image Index Issue
I submitted the image sitemap in GWT and only few of them get indexed in google, but now the indexed images are also getting de-index. Any solution for it? See the attached E4hPDQE
Technical SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Hello I have a Magento Store View issue!
Hi guys hope you can help - we have recenetly added a couple of "store views" to our magento website, in order for us to break down orders from channels that feed through M2e pro. What is great is that it gives us a little break down on amazon, ebay and the store sales separate, depending on which we select. However - we have ran into a issue with duplicate content, mainly on pages such as the checkout? /checkout/?___store=default&___from_store=m2e_ebay /checkout/?___store=default&___from_store=m2e_amazon Issue being the above - I am hoping we can keep how we have broken down the store for a quick reporting instance by day. However how do / if I can - get round this?? Surely if I was to redirect on the checkout it would cause issues. Any advice greatly appreciated Kelly
Technical SEO | | KellyLloyd6660 -
Ranking and Indexing Issue
We have an established site www.getinspired365.com that previously wasn't SEO optimised. We are currently in the process of testing out some new pages to see if we can get them to rank in Google, however we are seeing huge fluctuations in where they rank. Within the first few days we saw our page rank on the first or second page, however it has now dropped out of the top 250 search results. We are wondering if we have made any mistakes with our optimisation ? Example Page : Keyword to target - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special." URL : http://www.getinspired365.com/if-you-laugh-you-think-and-you-cry-thats-a-full-day-thats-a-heck-of-a-day-you-do-that-seven-days-a-week-youre-going-to-have-something-special We can see it has been indexed by Google but is now not ranking in the top 250 search engine results. We have run the On Page Grader from SEOMoz and it ranks the page as an "A" so we suspect that we are doing the SEO ok on the page, but can't work out why it isn't ranking, despite ranking on the first or second page after a few days ? We have other pages that aren't SEO optimised that rank better than our newly SEO optimised pages e.g. Keyword - "THE BEST LOVE IS THE KIND THAT AWAKENS THE SOUL AND MAKES US REACH FOR MORE, THAT PLANTS A FIRE IN OUR HEARTS AND BRINGS PEACE TO OUR MINDS. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME. THAT'S WHAT I'D HOPED TO GIVE YOU FOREVER" URL: http://www.getinspired365.com/20130528 Any advice you could offer would be great. Thanks ! Mike
Technical SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Need advice on having customer stores running on my subdomain
We have an online store product and we're working on the SEO for our new domain (foo.com in this example.) Our customers have the ability to change the domain of their store but many of them will likely stick with the subdomains we give them (store1.foo.com) We could potentially have thousands of stores soon using our subdomain. Each of these stores will have a very small link at the bottom to our own domain but other than this, the content is completely user-generated and not under our control. Are there risks/problems associated with this type of strategy? If so, could we perhaps avoid them by using robots.txt to block entire site until they change to their own domain? TIA, Sean
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
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 -
Keyword Canabalisation and my solution
Hi. According to one guy, in this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/good-seo-titles, the Meta Title, H1 Tag Title on the product page, and the category listing pages should be different to avoid keyword canabilisation. One problem I noticed in my website after reading about this topic, is that all my printers have the keyword sentence :"refurbished printer", yes 99% of the products are refurbished but in that way according to the answer in the above post I am competing against self, too many pages (1000) with the same keywords on it. So I decided to make some changes and I I would like to know the opinion of the experts here, I did this only for one product, then I would of course need to this for lots of products. 1. I created a different meta title. check here please http://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-color-laserjet-cp2025n-printer-new 2. In the product page itself, I removed the condition from the name of the product, instead I put the template, NAME - MODEL -CONDITION. 3. In the category listing page I havent made any change yet, it still shows the product name only http://www.theprinterdepo.com/new-printers/color-laser-new-printers Check 1st row, 4th column. Is this a good approach?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0