How to create a smooth blog migration from subdomain to subfolder main?
-
Hi mozzers,
We have decided to migrate the blog subdomain to the domain's subfolder (blog.example.com to example.com/blog).
To do this the most effective way and avoid impact SEO negatively I believe I have to follow this checklist:
- Create a list of all 301 redirects from blog.example.com/post-1 to example.com/post-1
- Make sure title tags remain the same on main domain
- Make sure internal links remain the same
-
Is there something else I am missing? Any other best practices?
-
I also would like to have all blog post as AMPs. Any recommendations if this something we should do since we are not a media site? Any other tips on successfully implementing those types of pages?
Thanks
-
Also OP shouldn't forget to use change of address tool as likely they have subdomain and main domain listed as separate properties in GSC
-
Hi there,
Re-submitting a new sitemap.xml wouldn't go amiss. I believe that AMP pages are best for news & high volume websites.
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
-
Hold Off on SEO Changes After Domain Migration?
We migrated our domain on April 4th. Our domain authority has dropped from 22 to 8. Traffic is down from 90 visits a day to 10. Search console has indexed about 120 out of 600 pages. I have been told it may take several months to recovers some element of domain authority. My SEO consultant has planned on implementing the following changes immediately: 1. Change in URL structure
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Build internal links (my site has very few).
3. Optimize URLs for specific keywords
4. Keyword optimization of URLs using Yoast.
5. Modify Schema Do we risk confusing Google further by making these changes until are domain authority and traffic has recovered? Is it safe to proceed with some "softer" changes such building internal links and keyword optimizing text whicl avoiding more disruptive changes such as re-writing URLs? Are we better off focusing on off site ranking factors such as link building and local SEO until domain authority recovers? How about only adding new content to the site such as blog posts and listings? To complicate matters the site is old and dated and we are working on a new UX design. So perhaps it would be better to launch the new UX at the exact same time as the onsite SEO optimization occurs. This could be less work and less disruptive. At the same time I would very much like to enjoy benefits of optimizing SEO now. Any thoughts????? Also, my domain migration has killed traffic. It is very concerning!! Is a 90% drop in traffic normal in the first ten days!? Thanks everyone!!!
Alan1 -
Can subdomains avoid spam penalizations?
Hello everyone, I have a basic question for which I couldn't find a definitive answer for. Let's say I have my main website with URL: www.mywebsite.com And I have a related affiliates website with URL: affiliates.mywebsite.com Which includes completely different content from the main website. Also, both domains have two different IP addresses. Are those considered two completely separate domains by Google? Can bad links pointing to affiliates.mywebsite.com affect www.mywebsite.com in any way? Thanks in advance for any answer to my inquiry!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Should I write a new page or a blog post?
I am trying to rank for a local SEO term on a website for a national company. Should I write an optimized blog post, or optimized site page? Does it make a difference? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj6130 -
The Great Subdomain vs. Subfolder Debate, what is the best answer?
Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain. They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict. John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50 Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains. He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference. http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/ Here is another post from the Website Magazine. They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure. Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important. http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller. Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Is there a problems with putting encoding into the subdomain of a URL?
We are looking at changing our URL structure for tracking various affiliates from: https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx to https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ Both would allow us to track affiliates, but the second would allow us to use cookies to track. Does anyone know if this could possibly cause SEO concerns? Also, For the site we want to rank for, we will use a reverse proxy to change the URL from https://aff_xxx.maindomain.com/quote/ to https://www.maindomain.com/quote/ would that cause any SEO issues. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Is it bad practice to create pages that 404?
We have member pages on our site that are initially empty, until the member does some activity. Currently, since all of these pages are soft 404s, we return a 404 for all these pages and all internal links to them are js links (not links as far as bots are concerned). As soon as the page has content, we switch it to 200 and make the links into regular hrefs. After doing some research, I started thinking that this is not the best way to handle this situation. A better idea would be to noindex/follow the pages (before they have content) and let the links to these pages be real links. I'd love to hear input and feedback from fellow Mozzers. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Subdomain canonicalisation
Hi Moz fans, I had a telephone conversation with an SEO company last week and they mentioned that the following "versions" of my domain were causing a canonicalisation issue; http://www.example.com www.example.com example.com I've already fixed the /index.html issue but do the above 3 also need to be fixed? Is the best solution to use a 301 redirect? As a side note, the SEOmoz web app doesn't identify these as being duplicate content... Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110 -
Help with creating a widget
I would like to create a widget that I can give to other website owners to place on their blog. Obviously the point of doing this is to get backlinks. The widget is a simple calculator. (Think of it like a mortgage calculator). I see that there are two ways of creating widgets: 1. Javascript 2. Iframe I've been reading this excellent tutorial on building a widget using javascript and jquery:http://alexmarandon.com/articles/web_widget_jquery/. However, with my limited knowledge of javascript it's going over my head. I understand that if I offer a widget that is in an iframe that the links don't get counted as backlinks, but rather as links from my own site. But, what if I offered code like this: <iframe src="http://www.mysite.com" width="300" height="250"></iframe> This tool was provided by MySite Would that be helpful to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0