Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?

[fullstackmarketing.io]

I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority?

Thanks.

[ThompsonPaul]

Mike, there is a technical solution specifically for this situation that will give you the best of both worlds!

You're only considering moving the blog to a subdomain because you need to make management of the backend code more efficient and you're wondering how much of an SEO hit you'll have to accept in order to accomplish that. As EGOL says (and I fully concur), moving to a subdomain is going to do serious damage to the value of the both the primary site and the blog.

What you really want is to have the WordPress install elsewhere, but still have it show to visitors (and search engines) like it lives in the /ecommerce-blog subdirectory.

This is exactly what a reverse proxy is designed to do. It allows you to have the WordPress code installed on a subdomain, but still serve the pages to the visitor from the subdirectory as you have been doing. So to the user, the blog looks and works just as it does now, but the code is actually running off a subdomain.

This can be a little tricky to set up, but as long as you have reasonable control over your server, and an experienced server administrator, it's not all that difficult. Especially in your case as you're replicating an existing structure so you won't need a whole slew of redirects. In fact, a reverse proxy could even be used to house the WP install on a completely separate server if you really want to separate the code from the ecomm code.

If your site runs under the Apache webserver, reverse proxy is available as a fairly simple Apache module (it's the config that's tricky.) It's also doable under Windows/IIS but harder. (Note this typically can't be done on shared hosting, but as an ecomm site, I assume you're running on at least your own VPS server?) Here's a post from here on SEOMoz by PointBlankSeo for a little more background on reverse proxies.

Hoe that gives you a second option to consider?

Paul

[EGOL]

If you have a kickass blog that attracts readers, links, likes, shares, etc., moving it to a subdomain will decrease the SEO value of the blog to your ecommerce rankings.  Why?  It will be on the subdomain where the link value is only partially shared with the root domain.  So, rankings for both the blog and the store might fall.  A couple years ago, I redirected all of my subdomains to folders in the root and the results were immediately kickass.

If you don't have a kickass blog it might not matter what you do since the blog really isn't an asset to the site that attracts readers, links, likes shares, etc.  In that case maybe you should dump the blog or kick it in gear if you want to spend your time in a worthwhile way.

I value my blogs highly enough that I would dump an ecommerce system if it was stinking up my blog.