Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
B2C directory website adding B2B ecommerce sub-domain
-
Hey fellow Mozzers,
Just got back from Mozcon and enjoyed getting to know a handful of you. I do in house SEO for a B2B wholesaler. We have a B2C website directory for homeowners to locate contractors to work on their home. On the site we have a products section which includes tech specs but not pricing. Our contractors have been asking us to add the ability to purchase their items online, so we are wanting to add a B2B sub-domain (store.domain.com) to our website for the contractors to purchase products online. We do not want consumers to be able to purchase the items and will have pricing behind a log in. I have a few questions that I'm hoping you might be able to answer:
1. What would be the best practice to not have duplicate content errors with products that are listed on both sites? Should we rel-canonical items shown on both domains or do something else?
2. We are not against having the new site be crawled, but will Google be upset/ding rankings because pricing is behind a log-in? Are there certain best-practices for B2B ecommerce sites?
3. Do you know of any other sites that have done this/do you have any recommendations on how to best implement this? -
1. What would be the best practice to not have duplicate content errors with products that are listed on both sites? Should we rel-canonical items shown on both domains or do something else?
This depends largely on what type of website you currently have. Are you using a content management system? Is it all HTML? What do plan to build the letter? There are quite a few things you can use to prevent duplicate content errors
Yoast WordPress SEO
Plug-in comes to mind is something that get you through a lot of duplicate contact every day however I don't know what you say the site is made of so I can't really tell you for certain what's very effective on yours.
I would say start off with a good developer that will not create duplicate content issues the first place.
Your recommendation would be Greg
2. We are not against having the new site be crawled, but will Google be upset/ding rankings because pricing is behind a log-in? Are there certain best-practices for B2B e-commerce sites?
The login page is just one page. You will not block the website's pages that are of value that come after the pages been logged in. For instance you can have a indexable website page with a
Login right there on the site itself it will then go through a process where it will not be accessed by anyone but members but you can indexes but I assure you
Using
or
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
Will serve your needs very well if you're using WordPress I love her I don't know you site.
3. Do you know of any other sites that have done this/do you have any recommendations on how to best implement this?
Very many sites of done this you are simply adding a members only site for your B2B customers you do not want the average Joe off the street trying to get it is a more closely knit group that probably pays a lot more money to you. You could do this with both woo commerce or getpremise.com
Both of them are WordPress plug-ins. I believe that a use of the premise plug-in along with your members being added and given a registration name will not cause an issue whatsoever.
I would build this out of WordPress however it is something I am very comfortable with and the site architecture I prefer.
When using WordPress I always suggest using to manage WordPress hosting company may I suggest WP Engine, ZippyKid, web synthesis, Pagely & Presslabs.
Those are all manage WordPress hosting companies if you want something for hosting that does not do 100% word press I would strongly suggest using FireHost
I hope this is better talk to you
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?
Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well. Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.
Web Design | | Brando161 -
Mergers & Acquisitions - Website Transition Good practice
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone has come across good practice for maintaining websites after a merger or acquisition where there needs to be an association between two websites of the two companies involved. For an acquisition, I'm considering moving the acquired company to a sub domain of the parent company e.g. aquiredcompany.parentcompany.com. On both websites there wmay be a prominant popup so visitors can switch between the websites if they have visited the incorrect one. One worry I have is the acquired company has some good rankings, which I want to keep. I will of course manage the process through 301 redirects. But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this approach or can suggest any better solutions. Thanks in advance, Stuart
Web Design | | Stuart260 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Subdomains For Real Estate Website
I am currently working on a proposal for a clients Wordpress website development which includes ongoing SEO after the website is developed. I have looked into a number of options and the one that seems the most cost effective involves using subdomains for the individual listings pages. What I want: clientsdomain.com/listings/idxnumber/ What I can get for a decent price: listings.clientsdomain.com/idxnumber/ So the majority of the website will actually exist on a subdomain because the IDX API will automatically populate pages for all of the MLS listings in the area (hundreds or thousands). Meanwhile the domain itself will have all the neighborhood pages and other optimized content, blogs and whatnot. My concern is that dividing the website like this will have negative effects on SEO. There wont be duplicate content across subdomain and main domain, but they will share a lot of links back and forth. I haven't found any recent sources on the topic. Almost everything I have found says that dividing a website in this manor is bad for SEO, but these articles are often many years old. Does anyone know of a Wordpress plugin/IDX company that can provide a solution that doesn't use a subdomain and actually just lists each MLS page within a directory? I am open to using another platform, I am just most familiar with Wordpress. Will using a subdomain in the ways mentioned above have a profound negative effect on SEO? Thank you for your time in responding, I greatly appreciate it.
Web Design | | TotalMarketExposure0 -
Parked Domain or Redirect
Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account. If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Site-wide footer links or single "website credits" page?
I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?
Web Design | | eseyo0