Company blog. What are the best solutions?
-
Hello Moz Community!
Our company has its own blog (www.awarablogs.com) - the blog was created some time ago by means of a simple blog-engine. Now we see that the structure of the blog is bad for SEO (it has long URLs, many useless folders, subdomains and so on), so we'd like to simplify it. But the engine doesn't allow to change its structure in the way we 'd like to. Our webmaster suggested that we use "Alias". Will this method really help us make our blog SEO-friendly? Or is it better to choose another blog software like Wordpress?
Thank you very much!
-
I concur. Wordpress is an excellent option for blogging and it would definitely better to put it on a subdirectory of your main site. Something like http://www.awaragroup.com/blog would be ideal.
-
I would use either Joomla or WordPress in a subfolder of your main site. Easyblog for Joomla is great, some work has to be done to get rid of ugly URLs. WordPress would proably be your best bet if you are looking to use it for blogging only.
I also noticed you were still using Joomla 1.5. I would think about upgrading that platform, due to security and it being unsupported by most modern plugins. If you like Joomla, and want to stick with it, upgrade to 3.2 and install easyblog. Their site has a ton of info on setting the URL structure to "simple" mode, which gets rid of the stuff you typically see in poorly planned out sites (/component/easyblog/YOURBLOGHERE/post/etc)
We have used both in the past, it really depends what you are familiar with and what platform you like the best.
-
Aliasing would make the urls a little easier to digest, you also might want to look at .htaccess rewrites to get rid of entire folders that you don't need:
In this example I would be getting rid of index.php, easyblog, and entry since group is what you are using for your blog. There are many reasons to get away from this platform, I took a brief look and besides the folder structure each blog has 3 h1 tags, the logo, awaragroup - blog, and then the post title. As Andy suggested, Wordpress is great for blogs and is free, and might even be easier to use than your current system, so long term I would look to make the changeover.
-
Hi,
In the longterm, moving to a platform like Wordpress will be a much better solution. This powers millions of sites, is hugely customisable and very good for SEO, with a lot of control, thanks to the Yoast plugin - and it's free!
-Andy
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
-
Old Blogs
We have several blogs on our site for a range of products we no longer stock. Would you set up a redirect for these - and how long would you keep it in place?
Technical SEO | | Caroline_Ardmoor0 -
Duplicate blog - will it be ok to do so
Hello, One of our client is interested in creating a duplicate blog under a new URL. We told them about Google penalizing the new blog since it would have duplicate content. Will it be ok to go ahead with the plan ? Their response was there are multiple news sites that carry the same stories. So, they said that it won't matter. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Best practices for making a very long URL shorter
Hi Moz folks! We are redesigning a website of 30,000+ pages. We are pulling together a spreadsheet for 301 redirects. So basically this: http://www.mywildlifesite.org/site/PageServerpagename=priorities_wildlife_endangered_species_protection#.Ws54SNPwbAw/mexican-spotted-owl Will direct to here, this is the nav architecture:
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane77
https://mywildlifesite.org/wildlife-conservtion/endangered-species-act-protections/endangered-species-list/birds/mexican-spotted-owl My question is, can I and should I truncate that new destination URL to make it easy for Google to see that the page topic is really the owl, like this:
https://mywildlifesite.org/endangered-species-list/mexican-spotted-owl Your input is greatly appreciated! Jane0 -
Best Way to Handle Near-Duplicate Content?
Hello Dear MOZers, Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem. Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar. As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course. Add 150+ more words to each description text block Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page Any other options or suggestions? Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages. Thank you folks, Ethan
Technical SEO | | BernsteinMedicalNYC0 -
Where and how much; Schema best practices.
Couple of schema questions: Should I 'only' mark up the contact page, as this has the most information? What about the header and footer, should I tag everything there also? If I do mark up the header, footer, and contact page, I end up with 3 "LocalBusiness" entries in Google testing tool, is that bad?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Removing links - Best practice
Hi I have noticed on webmaster that I have a lot of links to my sites from link building directories. Either I did this many years a go or somehow they've linked to me. Would links to link building directories harm my site? i.e linkspurt.com pingerati.net I have quite a few and just wondering what to do with them. Also I have some customer sites which are massive one site has 38,000 links coming to my site as I have put a credit that I built the site with a link back to mine. It has a low score in Google would this also harm my site? Any advise would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Best way to do a site in various regions
I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions He does mold removal and water damage repair. He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis. Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way. However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way. First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city. indy mold cincy mold dayton mold dayton water etc etc etc In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions. I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city. The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions. He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized? Thanks
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Managing international sites, best practises
This question follows on from my earlier question http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-replace-my-co-uk-site-with-my-com-site-in-the-us-google-results My client owns www.blindbolt.co.uk for the UK site and www.blindboltusa.com for their US site. They will shortly be having a new site for Australia. They have just acquired www.blindbolt.com and have expressed an interest in using this as the main hub for all of their sites, i.e. http://uk.blindbolt.com, http://aus.blindbolt.com. The current, existing sites (e.g. www.blindbolt.co.uk) could be 301'd to the new locations. Could I have your thoughts please on whether to go down this route of having international subdomains , vs keeping the sites on separate top level domains? What should I take into consideration? Is google smart enough to return different subdomain results in different countries? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | OffSightIT0