Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
-
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view.
Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution?
- 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post
- And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post
Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
-
LindaLV, we were actually going to 301 from the path to the subdomain (no content at the path). Could you explain a bit more about how subdomain-to-path 301-redirects would work? Would they not just end up somewhere where there is no content?
Lesley, we use IIS so not htaccess issues as such but, yes, we were having problems in that area.
Thank you both!
-
The original question was about moving a blog from a subdomain to a subfolder (hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain) and using the newly created subfolder as the canonical, which would be accessible.
I do see that in the example the question refers to a 301 from the subfolder to the subdomain, but I think that was just a little mix-up in writing up the example, and it should say that the 301 would be from the old subdomain to the new subfolder. Otherwise yes, that would be circular.
There is also the question of whether you'd need a canonical as well as a 301 (since that would be redundant) but I would probably do it anyway as a sort of belts-and suspenders approach, in case something went wrong. (But I worry too much.)
-
I don't think that will work. The reason being if I am understanding correctly, is that the canonical url will never be accessible. I don't know all of the specifics about what Google does on an internal level (like most SEO people) but I don't think it would fly just for the fact that the canonical is never able to be accessed.
Are redirections and htaccess issues the reason you cannot move over to using a sub directory?
-
We are going to do a very similar changeover in the near future and that is how we plan to go about it. I have been looking into it and I don't see any major drawbacks. (But if anyone else has other information--I too would love to hear about it before starting this...)
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
-
Should I have multiple websites for my different brands or one main website with different tabs/areas?
My client creates apps. As well as the apps they create themselves, they have made some of their own that cover various different topics. Currently they have individual websites for each of these apps, and a website for their app making business. They are asking whether they should just have one website - their app building site, which also includes information about the two apps they've built themselves. My feeling is it's better to keep them separate. The app building site is trying to appeal to a B2B audience and gain business to build new apps. AppA is trying to help carehomes and carers to streamline their business, and AppB is trying to help workplace and employee welfare. Combining them all will mean lots of mixed messaging/keywords even if we have dedicated areas on the site. I also think it will limit how much content we can create on each without being completely overwhelming for the user. If we keep them all separate then we can have a very clear user journey. I would of course recommend having blog posts or some sort of landing page to link to AppA and AppB's websites. Thoughts? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhitewallGlasgow0 -
Linking to External Websites?
Is it good to link external websites from every page. Since, the on-page grader shows there should be one link pointing to an external source. I have a website that can point to an external website from every page using the brand name of the specific site like deal sites do have. Is it worth having external link on every page, of-course with a no-follow tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Problems with a website-help
Soooooo, I did a crawl report on this site : www.greatwesternflooring.com and this was what was on the report. This is a dnn site. I'm guessing the site has a redirect loop given the http status code. Can anyone help me with a fix. (the developers have said there is no redirect on the site......clearly there is....) | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com/ | 2015-01-07T21:32:25Z | 609 : Redirect to already-visited URL received for page request. | Error attempting to request page; see title for details. | 302 | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com | <colgroup><col width="319"> <col width="144"> <col width="378"> <col span="39" width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Britewave
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |0 -
Do you get links from new websites?
There's a new industry specific website that looks decent. It's clean and nothing spammy. However, it's so new it's DA is under 10. Is it worth pursuing a link from a site like this? On one hand, there's nothing spammy and it is industry specific. On the other...it's just DA is so terrible (worse than any of our other links), I don't want it to hurt us. Any thoughts? Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Can I get posts from a blog host and put them on a private website ?
Hello everybody ! My client has a blog for 2 years with many posts on overblog, a French blog host like Blogger. Now we are currently building a new website with a new blog within the site. Those posts are valuable content that bring some traffic to the old blog. My idea was to re-publish those posts on the new blog to start with some good content. Unfortunately, the blog host don't let me use 301 redirects or re=canonical tags to tell search engines that the post is now in the new website and avoid duplicate content. What is the best SEO solution in this case ? Can we delete the posts on the old blog and publish them in the new one ? Thanks for your help! Bruno
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Buddyweb0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Blog Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs. Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice? Thanks Mozzers! Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830