Do knowledge base plugins on a subdomain have seo benefit?
-
Hi SEO Moz,
We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for.
We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction?
For instance -
Our website URL is http://widget.products.com
The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com
If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks.
-
Thanks Marcus - really great advice!
We checked out SupportPress on WooThemes and really liked it! Plus you are right as to how we can run it on our own domain.
What we might do is pick 5 keywords we want to rank for, and move all our sites under one domain - this should help spread the link juice through to the less performing sites, as our main site gets a lot more press and links.
Hopefully this is a good strategy!
Thanks for the help.
-
Right, the first issue, there are loads of options. I would personally look at something like this:
http://www.woothemes.com/2011/07/supportpress/This is a WordPress theme that expands on the core functionality and creates a support environment. This is a full theme so you would likely need another wordpress installation in a sub directory but it will give you a rich support environment and all on the same URL.
Alternatively, if you don't want to manage another install, you could use a WordPress forum plugin, BBPress will do the job but there are a list of options here:
http://chasesagum.com/5-best-choices-for-wordpress-forum-pluginsOn your other issue, that is a big vague, the sub domain is a different product / service and essentially a seperate site so it needs to rank (or not) on it's own merit. As it happens, this is the problem you will have with the knowledgebase if you put it on a separate subdomain.
With no URL or an in depth look I can only give you generic advice but really, I would look to bring all of this under one domain and have one, well ranking site rather than 3 separate sites that all struggle.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for that! We use WordPress as the CMS for our site. With something like TenderApp - we want to use it for Q&A but mainly, to have a very large and solid FAQ and Glossary on there (generated by us - and using keywords we want to rank for). I really like the SEO Moz one but I believe it's built in PHP? We don't have the resources or time at the minute to build our own service so we would like to use a plugin, but one that is hosted on our domain. Does something like this exist?
Also, I have another problem. Our website has another subdomain - our main site sells certain paid-for products, but we also offer a self-service solution that is free that is branded differently (though we do associate it with our brand name). Currently, this self-service solution is hosted on a subdomain to our main site - but is not doing very well in ranking for our keywords. What would you recommend we do? Our keywords are not in the domain name unfortunately.
Thanks for your help!
-
Hey
These are essentially forums for you to engage with your customers and not a million miles away from this here Q&A system.
If you are using these to answer common customer questions, build a knowledge base and benefit from user generated content then it would certainly be better to have this on the main domain as a subdirectory than to have it on the sub domain.
Sure, you could have links from the sub domain back to the main site but really, these are two separate entities and in every discussion where people have asked the subdomain vs directory question I have never seen anyone say subdomain.
You want one site with one set of inbound links and one nice healthy link profile if at all possible.
This is a good read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-micrositesAlso, loads of other articles on SEOMoz answering this question to give you some further reading:
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=subdomain+or+subdirectory+site:seomoz.org&oq=subdomain+or+subdirectory+site:seomoz.org&gs_l=serp.3...4939.10518.0.10589.34.25.7.0.0.1.253.1620.23j1j1.25.0...1.0...1c.AWvjSgMGrPI&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=6dd2acfce60f574c&biw=1366&bih=643&ion=1What are you using for your main site? A CMS? There maybe an easy solution without having to go this subdomain route. Let me know what you are using and I will try and offer some suggestions as I am sure the rest of the happy shiny seomoz people will as well.
Hope this helps.
Marcus
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
-
Blog on subdomain of e-commerce site
Hi guys. I've got an e-commerce site which we have very little control over. As such, we've created a subdomain and are hosting a WordPress install there, instead. This means that all the great content we're putting out (via bespoke pages on the subdomain) are less effective than if they were on the main domain. I've looked at proxy forwarding, but unfortunately it isn't possible through our servers, leaving the only option I can see being permenant redirects... What would be the best solution given the limitations of the root site? I'm thinking of wildcard rewrite rules (eg. link site.com/blog/articleTitle to blog.site.com/articleTitle) but I'm wondering if there's much of an SEO benefit in doing this? Thanks in advance for everyone's help 🙂
Technical SEO | | JAR8970 -
Javascript redirects -- what are the SEO pitfalls?
Q: Is it dangerous (SEO fallout) to use javascript redirects? Tech team built a browser side tool for me to easily redirect old/broken links. This is essentially a glorified 400 page -- pops a quick message that the page requested no longer exists and that we're automatically sending you to a page that has the content you are looking. Tech team does not have the bandwidth to handle this via apache and this tool is what they came up with for me to deliver a better customer experience. Back story: very large site and I'm dealing with thousands of pages that could/should/need to be redirected. My issue is incredibly similar to what Rand mentioned way back in a post from 2009: Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO? We've also decided to let these pages 404 and monitor for anything that needs an apache redirect. Tool mentioned above was tech's idea to give me "the power" to manage redirects. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | FR1230 -
Update page for better SEO score?
Hi, Is it important to update a page sometimes to score better in SEO?
Technical SEO | | parfumerienl
Or if i make a page and never change it, it would be good enough.0 -
Monthly SEO contract or dedicated employee?
Have one more question. There are people offering monthly SEO contracts like this http://www.link-building-strategies.com/monthly-link-building.html My question is that is it worth it for $199 a month? Though its reviews are good on freelancing sites but I can also hire a full time employee for that cost. Is there anything a dedicated employee cannot do that these guys are offering? Only drawback I see is I dont know the links where these guys are submitting but I am ready to spend much more time (my employees time) to get the things done. Please suggest. Your valued opinions welcome 🙂 Following is the detailed offering 1. 300 links submissions = 180 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Articles on 75 different article sites, each published article will have 2 back links to your site. 70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6; all with different C classes IPs.
Technical SEO | | geekwik
2. 60 links submissions = 30 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 1 Review for your site fromon** 30 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs.
3. 160 links submissions = 100 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing ** 2 Original Press on 50 Press Release sites, each published article will have 2 back links to your site. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7; all with different C classes IPs.
4. 80 links submissions = 40 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing** 1 article **(300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too. - All the submissions are 100% handmade, NO automated software is involved. You can check this by looking at our over 1000 GOOD SEO REVIEWS made during the past 5 years on 4 freelancing sites. The links will not appear all at once to your site. The indexing process of all the links will take between 1-3 months. The links will appear gradually to your site and everything will look naturally for all the search engines0 -
Is seo hosting still working ?
Hi, I just starting to do seo hosting for my seo campaign, using 5 IP in europe and 5 IP in US, all class C and have different IP and different domain. is it still work ? or it just will wasting my time ? thanks
Technical SEO | | theconversion0 -
SEO Campign Wont Synch up with facebook
Bonjour.... After enthusiastically telling a client we had a new offering where we could offer more insights into social media activity i enthusiatically dived into SEO Moz's social reporting tab with the ainm of synching the report to the clients facebook page. But after 20 mins of getting an error message it was clear I could not get SEO moz's socail media reporting tab to sunch up with http://www.facebook.com/#!/TennantsAuction or
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.facebook.com/TennantsAuction Here is a screen shot of my frustration:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/cant-hook-in-facebook-seo-mozcopy.jpg I realise i have to have admin access to the facebook account which the client can give me but i need to know please is the feature broken or am i doing something wrong? Thanks in advance, David0 -
Global SEO Targeting
Hi, I have a website currently on the domain example.co.uk (.com is not available) I'm looking to enter other markets such as Brazil, Russia - obviously content will need to change to suit the desired market / language. I'm looking for some information on the best practice to enter foreign markets. I was thinking maybe to create individual sites for each location eg: example.br example.ru This way I could localise each site in terms of business directories, content, language etc. Or have my example.co.uk with various languages on it Experience, suggestions are welcomed - thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Australian Web Design and SEO
Hi Guys, I really could do with some gudienace or answers to the following questions: Are the any specific web design or technical issues that are different in Australian search engines compared to the UK? Are there any web design issues that are different to the UK? Are there any useful things I should consider from an SEO point of view if I am launching a website in Australia compared to the UK? Any helpw ould be much apprciated! Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090