Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?
-
Hi there
I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains?
Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2.
It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using:
www.website.com/category1 (for store 1)
www.website.com/category2 (for store 2)
The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing).
I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store).
So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set:
This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank.
Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo?
Another option I was considering was:
www.website.com (for store 1)
store2.website.com (for store 2)
store3.website.com (for store 3)
www.website.com/blog (for blog)
Can this work? Good or bad for seo?
best regards
-
I'd go with
www.mybrand.com/store/category1/subcateory
www.mybrand.com/store/category2/subcateory
www.mybrand.com/store/category3/subcateory...this keeps everything neatly organized for both SEO and the UX (not to mention your content management).
I've been building professional ecommerce websites for 12 years.
Fred
-
It seems to me that everything is going to be relevant to the sport of paintball correct?
here is a great example of how I would set up your site changing the subdomains name to the subfolder name.
if you want to target outside the United States you have more work. But this is where I would do for right now instead of creating a separate store your brand can become a hub for paintball knowledge and paintball guns, accessories etc. that is the way to build a brand. With people being such a fun sport you could probably attract clients by posting videos and use the sport to create a form. For people in your area.
"using the keywords that you are going to use for your sub domains for your subfolders
www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)
www.mybrand.com/paintball = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)
www.mybrand.com/airguns/ = if i decide to sell airguns"
Kinda off-topic but hopefully helpful.
Magento Is kind of slow when not set up properly but very configurable I thought I would give a HHVM configuration you might want to try. https://gist.github.com/blueprintmrk/1e95e2946cabcbb8502d
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thank you all for the replies. So it seems the best option is to go with:
www.mybrand.com as main website for Airsoft and
.../store3 .../store4
thanks
-
Patricks suggestions I think answer your query.
I googled airsoft and it seems strongly related to paintball & airguns. I would not recommend subdomains but keeping it on your main domain. Our experience in fashion is that the more products you have that volume exponentially increases sales. ie go with www.brandname.com/paintball
That said you appear to be leaning towards a sub-domain. As it has completely separate customer bases.
I would try and re-think that strategy and see if there is any way you can live with one URL. You will be dedicated to one purpose not focusing on 2 or 3. Become the expert in airgun sports...
Let me know if have any queries.
-
Hi guys
Thanks for the replys. Let's me put more details. My website so far is specialized in airsoft. My brand is airsoft related and we have hundreds of categories airsoft related and I have a good rank for airsoft related keywords.
So my website is something like www.mybrand.com.
Now I'm planning to work with paintball. Despite they are both "action/shooting sports", they are different, with different customers, different products, hundreds of different categories, and of course, different keywords
I'm using magento and so far the homepage for my website is allways www.mybrand.com ... The page content (categories, products, etc.) are shown depending the store the customer has chosen. (default is airsoft page, but he can change for paintball).
So the idea was:
www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)
paintball.mybrand.com = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)
airguns.mybrand.com = if i decide to sell airguns
tks again
-
Patrick you are fast my friend & just gave him some great resources!
-
I don't know why you would want to create two stores on one website?
If you have a store that is selling vacuum cleaners hypothetically and another that is selling weed wacker's and you do not have any relevance between the two stores e.g. they are for a separate audience.
are you trying to reach the same audience use one website.
To websites even to subdomains
e.g. subdomain1.example.com & subdomain2.example.com will be treated as separate domains by Google.
There are some things you can do to tell Google this is one site and my opinion is if you are going to simply create a headache for yourself by using subdomains un less you have a very good reason?
I would suggest either combining these stores into one business if you are trying to get everything on one domain. Without knowing much more about the project I can tell you that subfolders "example.com/subfolder" tend to work much better then subdomains for passing on domain authority.
You want to create separate businesses create separate websites.
If you want to create one website that sells everything use subfolders unless you are doing geo-targeting and or other reasons that make sense for The end-user who if you are trying to target different stores on the same domain they will get confused.
I hope that helps,
Tom
-
Hi there
Rand had a great Whiteboard Friday on this a few months back called Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO. You should also check out Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?
My first question would be if all the stores fall under the same brand? Or, are they all able to live on their own separate sites with their own branding? Reason being, if you have everything under one domain as subdirectories, everyone can benefit from the domain's authority.
I would review the resources above and see if those can help - there is a ton of great information. Let me know if it doesn't! Good luck!
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
-
Keyword SEO
Hi everyone! I am pretty new to SEO so all the help would be great. Does every webpage on our website need a focus keyword for example like tructiepbongda Just to note that I am using Yoast on Wordpress. Many thanks,
Technical SEO | | yenu0 -
Moving a subdomain to subfolder with CNAME
Hi all, We have our docs in a subdomain on GitHub and looking to move it into a subfolder. Github offers the ability to redirect via CNAME https://gitbookio.gitbooks.io/documentation/platform/domains.html I am getting conflicting information on if this will work or cause duplicate content and hurt our SEO.
Technical SEO | | kate.hassey0 -
Subdomains
Hello Seo Experts, Can any one help me with this issue... I do have issues with my subdomains, My site name is http://www.bharatdesi.com, should I have subdomain http://www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad this way or hyderabad.bharatdesi.com. Please any can answer my question, which way I have to organize my subdomains... and also give me some examples.. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Vinss0 -
Onsite SEO Strategy for a large accommodation site
Hi All I have been thinking about the best strategy for keyword optimisation on a forthcoming accommodation website I am involved with. This may be a bit of a newbie type question, but most of my work has been on considerably smaller sites to date.... Lets say the site will have 1 primary landing page for "Hotels in Bristol" and then 50 pages that are each for a hotel in Bristol. The aim would be for the primary page which will be a browse/search result type page to rank well for the term 'Hotels in Bristol' and other similar terms. If each of the hotel listing pages that have a hotel in Bristol on, have the phrase 'Hotel in Bristol' contained within the title, url, page content, maybe headings/alt tags etc. will the result be that the rank for the site is 'spread too thin' across the domain? Whats the best way to drive all the relevancy and keyword usage on the 50 listing pages, to the primary page such that that is the one that ranks well? And the other pages rank more for the hotel name etc? I guess one way would be to avoid using the words hotels and Bristol in the title/URL etc.. but the natural approach for usability (not SEO) would be to use these words i.e. http://www.newtravelsite.com/hotels/bristol/stgeorgeshotel/ Or would each of the 50 listing pages simply need a followed, anchored link pointing the main landing page? I'm sure there may be a fundamental technique to do this that has alluded me so far, but any help, thoughts or guidance much appreciated! Regards Simon
Technical SEO | | SCL-SEO0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
Is there SEO value in having images referenced on other sites?
We use Amazon to host our assets (images, videos, PDFs, etc). These assets can be used across multiple sites we own and we reference them appropriately via our CMS. example asset URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lawgical/assets/data/539/original.png We have an infographic we recently distributed that is hosted on Amazon. Obviously we want any link value to go back to our primary URL where we laid out the infographic, however some of the infographic sites are just referencing the above source image URL. Are we losing SEO / link value by not have the infographic hosted on our domain? Do search engines count these image references as a "link"? For your reference... Infographic post: http://www.serve-now.com/articles/841/process-server-vs-sheriff-infographic Example infographic site usage: http://www.infographicsposters.com/law-infographics/which-is-better-process-server-or-sheriff
Technical SEO | | trentc0 -
Site forwarding - seo friendly or not?
Recently i decided to change my domain name - and although i have written several useful and working .htacess files with 301 redirects, this one became more complicated by the fact that I went through TWO domain name changes, before settling on the second one. Having seen some issues with the browser not being able to interpret correctly the .htaccess file, i temporarily suspended the .htaccess file, and opted instead for site forwarding. I don't know the mechanics behind site forwarding, or whether it is seo friendly or just a method for ip addressing, a sort of pseudo domain name server record change.
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites
I let it lie for a few weeks, until the dust settled, and yesterday put back the basic .htaccess file, with a 301 redirect, which directs the original domain name to be forwarded to the new one ( also it has a conditional in place to solve canonical issues). It works fine. But right now i am not seeing the link juice, the domain age, the domain page rank that it has. It has gone to zero, when it used to be three, sometimes four. I also made the change of address using webmaster tools. How long ( forever?) will it take to see my old page rank come back, even if it loses 10% from the change? And does site forwarding help or hinder seo ranking?0 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0