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
-
Subdomain/subfolder question
Hi community, Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com? I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
SSl and SEO
Does the type of SSL used on a site have any significance to trust and seo ranking?
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Target: blank. Does it make an SEO difference?
I've notice many sites MOZ included no longer use the target: blank attribute. I think that's what it's called. Basically when a link on your site opens a new tab in the browser as opposed to replacing the browser window you are in. Given that MOZ think of everything, I would love to hear opinions on this.
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Yoast SEO Plugin and Theme Conflict - Meta Tags
I have installed yoast seo plugin and a theme that I purchased.
Technical SEO | | vivadata
I have added site title and meta description for the index page through yoast seo plugin see here http://screencast.com/t/AdjMynym8Tm however this does not work as can be seen on the test site
http://importingtips.com/test/ does anyone have any advice? Thanks0 -
SEO basics for Q&A tool
Hi everyone, our company wants to launch a Q&A forum on our website. The goal is to keep the useres interacting with our website, generate leads (of course) and... last but not least... to generate UGC for our website (and Google of course)... [We organise career events with big companys for students, professionals, give career advice etc..] From a SEO perspective, I find the following points difficult to overcome: the possible problem of "thin" content, many URL's with a question and only 1 or 2 answers will not look good for Google, especially when there are a lot of it (Panda-Update). One solution could be to noindex pages with thin content, but imagine that you have an active community, this could take ages and we got other things to do... the problem of finding ALL content: what would be the best solution to make sure that G finds all UGC, even the older content? Would it be enough to link to older questions on the page of the actual question? Let's say, this page contains links to the 5 questions before and so on... Or should there be categories of questions, where you list all of the questions ever asked??? would you/can one optimise the content? Users do not ask questions with the beloved keywords and if there would be a standard solution that the URL and the Title-Tag contains the question, there could be a lot of strange/not useful pages on our domain... I hope I could make clear what my problems are and I hope someone can give me some good advice... Thanx!!
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Directing traffic to subdomain
Hi everyone, For this question, please note that we will be directing traffic using a load balancer (an Amazon ELB, to be specific) rather than using a 301 redirect. The question: Will the SEO ranking of links to pages be negatively impacted by directing traffic to servers with a different hostname (or subdomain) within mycompany.com? For example, we would like to have www.mycompany.com load balanced between host1.mycompany.com and host2.mycompany.com. Many thanks for your input! Jay
Technical SEO | | SeoExpansion0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
SEO LINKS
New to S.E.O. so excuse my naivety. I have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk
Technical SEO | | CPE0