Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
-
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us.
Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog).
We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum.
We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to:
- 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed.
- Submit new site maps to search engines.
- Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.).
- Send out a newsletter to our subscribers.
- Update our forum members.
- Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure.
Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period?
OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains?
Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally!
Thanks
Jay
-
Ah, yes that does change things a bit! In that case go back to your first post and do what it there. I'd agree that if you are changing the store anyway then having that as the root make sense. Your checklist is pretty good. I'd add "build new links to the new categories" too.
However I still think that the key to success for a site like your is getting the content closer to the product. You need to get the stock next to your content, where as it sounds like you are doing the opposite (putting content in to the shop). That is OK if it is supporting the sales process, but try to think of everything flowing towards the shop not aware from it.
Sounds like interesting times.
-
Thanks again Mat,
Another thing I should have mentioned (we have lots of project on the go right now!) is that we are redesigning the shop and at the point we are changing our URL structure we are also launching an updated version of the shop software (latest version of Magento - to help with internal admin issues) along with a new theme for the shop itself. Our shop has around 25,000 customers and we are using Magento's features to reduce our product page count from 35,000 to around 1,000 (thanks to Bundle and Configurable products) to reduce the number of similar pages per fitment etc.
The new shop theme (which will also incorporate our new home page) will feature content from the blog and forum - but is based around the shop.
I like some of your ideas in terms of linking to shop categories at the end of blog posts for related products.
We have a system in place (although currently disabled) that displays adverts on the forum from the shop based on keywords picked up in threads - the system is currently being refined at the moment.
-
I thought that must be what you were aiming for (because it certainly looks like a huge opportunity). I don't know whether changing the URL structure is going to help you though.
If I were working on it my ideal solution would be to rebuild on an integrated platform that could blend the 3 parts of the site using a common architecture. My choice would be drupal + drupal commerce. I'd build a common vocabulary (taxonomy) that was used for dsicussions, articles and stock items so that if users were having a discussion about tuning a Nissan 200sx then they'd see the top selling tuning components for that car. Likewise I'd be tying profiles back to the store (my ride) and articles back to it too.
However ideal solutions aren't cheap and you probably didn't come here looking for ways to blow 5-figure sums!
As the other end of the scale I'd be looking at what specific changes would help you hit those two goals: Better crawling of the shop. More users in the shop. There are probably some cheap easy wins there:
Home page : Spend some money on getting that right. Treat it as your website homepage not yourblog home page. Get recently added products, best sellers etc up on that page and link in to the blog less. Even if you have to manually edit it once a week that will probably be a win.
Blog: Get in the habit of ending blog posts with a related list - just link in to relevant categories of the shop. Keep the users and the link equity flowing.
Forum: Harder. You have the category block on the forum home page, but stats from forums I run suggest most people hardly use that page and don't scroll down much on it. Most come in and just hit "new posts" a lot. You could looking at some of the add-ons that let you have sponsored sections in forums and use these to run internal adverts related to each category. The tricky would be to change them frequently to stop ad blindness. Maybe mix them up with occasional big offers for members to help "train" them to look out for adverts.
I'd also look at the menu. Consider 'demoting' some items to make sure everyone knows it is shop + blog + forum. Sub menus for the shop categories would help make it easier to access the store and also help with deeper indexing.
I could go on all day. Can you tell I like the site ?
-
Thanks for your reply Mat, I guess I should have been a bit more specific with the project!
The goal is to get more of our site visitors to view the shop, and increase awareness of the products we supply. Currently the blog makes us no money, and since the majority of visitors (to articles not the homepage) come via other source such as Facebook and other back-links it doesn't seem right to me to have the shop "tucked away out back" when it should be in the shop window. The blog to me is the 3rd most valuable of the 3 sections on our site - with the shop 1st and the forums 2nd, so the plan is to re-arrange things to ensure the most important asset is the one you are presented with on our homepage.
Part of the goal is to ensure that Google crawls more of the shop products and that more of our back-links add to our product/category rankings on our shop since currently lots of our incoming links are just to driftworks.com (i.e. the blog) this value could be put to better use! I think...?
-
Nice project. It sounds daft, but what are you actually trying to achieve?
Looking at your home page it is only really a visit to the blog as you call it that. It's a stand alone page with a bit of everything anyway. What do you want to achieve that you can't do with a home page redesign?
I'm going to presume that somewhere in the mix the aim is to get more of that traffic spending money.
Forums are a tricky one. People tend to use packaged forum products that feels distinct from the rest of the site (vbulletin in your case) - which encourages people to just use the forum and ignore the bits of the site that actually make money. I'm tackling that issue on a site at the moment.
Moving to subdomains would probably encourage that if anything. If that were my project I'd be looking to make the 3 parts more integrated not less. That way those who come for the community aspect wouldn't be tucked away in their own area away from all the good money making stuff!
Couple of examples: You are using tags on the blog but these don't tie back in to shop categories or products. Likewise you have discussion on blog posts, but these don't relate to the forum. I'd be trying to blur the line between all three elements as much as possible.
I don't think I have answered your specific question, but I am struggling to get what the aim is, sorry.
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
How much change should you make to your site in one go?
Hey everyone, So we are currently working on a new website and are in the final stages right now. We have some plans for a brand name change too and there is some debate internally whether we should: a) roll out the new site now and hold off on the rebrand - let the redirects kick in and the site bed in so to speak. Then when the dust settles look at a domain name change b) Roll out the new site with the domain name change too - an all in change A bit of background on the changes being made: The new website will have some structural changes but the main blog content will remain the same - this is where we get the majority of our traffic. The blog will have a slight page layout change but the core content, structure, urls, etc. will be exactly the same. The core website surrounding the blog will change with 301 redirects from old out of date content pages consolidated to fewer, more relevant pages. I hope I've explained enough here, if not please let me know and I'll add more detail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hotchilidamo0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version. **My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
SEO structure question: Better to add similar (but distinct) content to multiple unique pages or make one unique page?
Not sure which approach would be more SEO ranking friendly? As we are a music store, we do instrument repairs on all instruments. Currently, I don't have much of any content about our repairs on our website... so I'm considering a couple different approaches of adding this content: Let's take Trumpet Repair for example: 1. I can auto write to the HTML body (say, at the end of the body) of our 20 Trumpets (each having their own page) we have for sale on our site, the verbiage of all repairs, services, rates, and other repair related detail. In my mind, the effect of this may be that: This added information does uniquely pertain to Trumpets only (excludes all other instrument repair info), which Google likes... but it would be duplicate Trumpet repair information over 20 pages.... which Google may not like? 2. Or I could auto write the repair details to the Trumpet's Category Page - either in the Body, Header, or Footer. This definitely reduces the redundancy of the repeating Trumpet repair info per Trumpet page, but it also reduces each Trumpet pages content depth... so I'm not sure which out weighs the other? 3. Write it to both category page & individual pages? Possibly valuable because the information is anchoring all around itself and supporting... or is that super duplication? 4. Of course, create a category dedicated to repairs then add a subcategory for each instrument and have the repair info there be completely unique to that page...- then in the body of each 20 Trumpets, tag an internal link to Trumpet Repair? Any suggestions greatly appreciated? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Changing Hosting Companies - Site Downtime - Google Indexing Concern
We are getting ready to switch to a new hosting company. When we make the switchover, our sites will be offline for a couple of hours and in some cases perhaps as long as 12 hours while DNS is configured -- should we be worried about Google trying to index pages and finding them unavailable? Any fear of Google de-indexing pages. Our guess was that Google would not de-index anything after just a short period of not being able to find pages -- it would have to be over an extended period of time before GOOGLE or BING would de-index pages -- CORRECT? Just want to gut check this before pulling the trigger on switch over to new hosting company. We appreciate input on this and/or any other thoughts regarding the switch over to new hosting company that we may not have thought of. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720