Shopping Carts & Sub Domains
-
I was hoping someone could guide me in making the correct decision regarding integrating my existing domain with a hosted shopping cart.
I have an existing website to promote my bricks and mortar retail operation and am expanding into web retailing. I will be using one of the major hosted shopping carts. What is the best way to join the two components from an SEO perspective? Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider and have both components operate under the same general domain?
I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites.
I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other.
And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole.
What is the truth? Which is the better way to go?
Any guidance would be appreciated.
-
I don't want to misrepresent what Mr. Cutts had to say on this subject as I don't yet understand all the nuances of the topic.
Here is the link to Matt's comments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk
Thanks for patiently entertaining my questioning.
-
The way that search engines have treated subdomains has changed repeatedly over time. The way that they treat a folder has been much more consistent.
Also, in that video did Matt Cutts specifically state that if you divide your site between a subdomain and a root domain will the power of your site be the same as if they were united?
There are a lot of domains on the web that have many subdomains that are owned by various people. The ranking power of subdomain A does not influence the ranking of subdomain B on these sites.
-
I just did some more digging around on the web and stumbled on a video from 10/2012 of Matt Cutts essentially saying to do whatever you want; Sub domain vs sub folder, there is not much difference in the way google treats them now.
I wish I could latch onto a definitive position. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot!
I will still research the cart pointed to a sub-folder scenario as you guys recommend.
-
pointing a folder would involve some DNS changes (to the CNAME record) - i think.
You would be best asking BC - it would be a similar process to pointing a subdomain to BC.
If you host a solution you are not always stuck in time, for example I use things like WooCommerce which is always being updated with new features and gives you great controls.
And just to clarify I am not saying that you cannot do the things YOU may want to do, but there are things that unless you've controls within the server you can't do - like implement GZIP for instance which can be a big deal on big sites.
-
My understanding is that, unlike licensed cart solutions, if you use a hosted cart like BC, it resides on their server and cannot be moved elsewhere, .
As for the BC templates being limiting, this is not the case for anything at the product level. My designers have been able to greatly modify our BC pages. We have been able to do anything we wanted so far. I have no issues with BC. They are adding new functionality at a startling pace. If we were using a licensed cart, we would be frozen in time, or have to keep pace with evolving web functionality ourselves.
I agree that we would not want to use BC as the front pages of our site. For this, it would be too limiting, which is exactly why I am in the situation I am. We want the best of both worlds without sacrificing on SEO.
I am not sure how you would "point BC to a folder on our site." I just don't know; I am not a web guy.(trying to learn, though)
-
moving the info site to BC is ok in general.
The reason both EGOL and I recommend having them together and on your own server is that you can control everything (see EGOL's list) and you aren't second guessing the settings on another server which you have no control over. It also means that things like templates can be made much more flexible to meet your exact needs and not just a few of your requirements.
If you can't some how point BC to a folder on your site then moving everything to BC is ok - the other option of course is to set up a new domain and let it exist in it's own right but you wouldn't get any benefit from that just as you wouldn't from a subdomain.
-
First off, I have to admit to EGOL I was wrong when I said I read “ that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole. This was a false recollection of an article about search engines being more lenient in assessing duplicate content in the form of product descriptions on retail sites that sell many variations of the same basic item. I apologize for including BS in my original post.
That being said, I would like to clarify my situation in hopes that advice can be offered.
I have an informational site that is produced with a CMS. It uses a domain I bought through Godaddy. The sight resides on another hosting service (not Godaddy). I am setting up my shopping cart with BigCommerce. How do I best integrate the two components? It sounds like the cart in a subdomain option is out. An option might be to move the informational site to be hosted on Bigcommerce and have it, and the cart, within the same domain? It sounds like EGOL recommends against this.
-
I think what EGOL means is that switching the domain to your hosting provider means you loose control of certain things within that domain which can be very important to seo. What could be a good compromise here is that you look at putting the shopping cart within a folder on the domain...
That is it. Some shopping systems require you to place all of your content into their system - your articles, your homepage, everything.
Then they can charge you high fees on all of your bandwidth, limit your ability to install software such as wordpress, use htaccess, have full and complete control over the format of your pages, have formats that require a lot more time to manage, not allow you to run scripts in the cgi-bin, not allow chron jobs.
They all do not have all of these problems. But some are really limiting and I would not want to marry into something that will limit my options.
I would look for a very flexible cart that allows you to have full control over the entire domain. Confining cart activities in a single folder would not be bad, but I still think that is limiting because I would like to have the ability to place "buy buttons" on any page anywhere within the site - even on pdfs if I want them there.
Lots of people come to these forums saying that they can't do one thing or another because of their shopping cart.
-
I think what EGOL means is that switching the domain to your hosting provider means you loose control of certain things within that domain which can be very important to seo. What could be a good compromise here is that you look at putting the shopping cart within a folder on the domain (not a subdomain as this would be a bad move), this means the work you've done on the domain would continue to effect the static info on there and the shop within the folder.
it may not be possible, it depends on your shopping cart provider - if it can't be done then move the domain across and ensure you have redirects in place from old domain links to new ones (eg your about pages redirect).
Hope that helps clear things up
-
I'm sorry, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but these answers seem totally contradictory to me. One the one hand EGOL said that he agrees that "**putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain" **
yet he also writes "The day that my sites get hosted by a shopping cart provider is a day that you can bet big money that I am dead and under."
I am sure they weren't intended to be contradictory and that I am simply misunderstanding. EGOL, would you mind elaborating or clarifying please?
-
I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites.
I agree with this. All of my sites are done this way.
I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other.
This is BS from an SEO viewpoint. Although some snooty marketing people might recommend it.
You can have unique banners for the store and promote it in tasteful ways that make this distinction for your visitors.
It's not about how it is hosted (subdomain vs folders)... it's how your navigation presents it to visitors and search engines.
And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole.
Where are you reading this stuff?
Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider...
The day that my sites get hosted by a shopping cart provider is a day that you can bet big money that I am dead and under.
I want my pages to be finely crafted arrows. I don't know if I am going to get that from a shopping cart system.
Someday you will probably decide to leave that shopping cart provider... it will be a lot easier to make that decision if you are not completely married to them.
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
-
Multisite domain
good morning I have a wordpress site I have activated the multisite, currently the site has a domain authority of 8, when I publish a post, it is indexed quite quickly, if I publish a post in a language other than the /es subdomain it takes 24 hours why? If the author domain is the same, why does the employee take longer to be indexed on Google? Thank you
Technical SEO | | alainscilly770 -
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
SEO & IFrame problem
Hi All, I will try and keep this as simple as possible. My product page links to a separate page with an IFrame, giving my users the option to upload artwork for the product. The IFrame contains the external file upload site (mail big file). When finished, the user can use a button link to return to the product page to continue with their order. As soon as the page with the IFrame was crawled by Google, the IFrame page started to rank in place of where my product page used to rank, yet there is no content on the page relating to my product (just a file upload). So now users are visiting the IFrame via the same query which must be an absolute headache and not useful at all. I have tried the following: 1. Added a line in body text which contains an internal link pointing to the product page using exact match anchor text for the query. (This didn't work) 2. I applied a no index tag to the IFrame, and now my product page is no longer ranking at all. Can anyone help me solve this puzzle. I believe I might be missing something. Kind regards, Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
English and French under the same domain
A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant.
Technical SEO | | coolhandluc
The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks1 -
Redirects & 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I'm probably missing some GLARING error here, but I'm hoping you can help me! We recently built a new website on Wordpress and attempted to use a redirect plugin to take care of some old pages. The issue we are having though, is that when you click an old link you are not automatically redirected and instead are given a 404 error page. Then, when you try to view another page (by clicking a navigation item), every pages shows a 404 error. I implemented a redirect plugin, however it seems to start to work then still throws the 404 page. I believe this has something to do with the htaccess file which has the standard WP rewrite info in there... The way the old site was setup was kind of janky, so wondering if it's on that side or if I'm just going crazy. An old URL example would be http://orchards inn.com/index.php/specials and the new page is http://orchardsinn.com/special-offers. Sometimes the redirect seems to work, and others it actually throws a 404 page, then every other page in the navigation is 404'd as well. Your help is GREATLY appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing0 -
Registering expired domains
Hi there, I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Linking root domains and youtube
All of my competitors have high linking root domains from youtube and our isn't showing up although we have 1.5 million views to youtube. I tried adding our URL to the videos but it hasn't recognized as a linking root domain. What should I do?? There's a ton of SEO juice here I want to tap into! watch?v=GTXFRTY4CCA&list=UUOcfF9LAHKedNSyk-gk5xDw&index=28
Technical SEO | | tonymartin0 -
Should we use & or and in our url's?
Example: /Zambia/kasanka-&-bangweulu or /Zambia/kasanka-and-bangweulu which is the better url from the search engines point of view?
Technical SEO | | tribes0