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 you use www?
The age old question. Should I use "www." for a brand new content site assuming my goal (and most goals starting out) is to get to millions of visits per month? Does the community agree with, http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/? The only reason I question it honestly, since most high traffic companies in my search use www., is because moz doesn't. Thanks for your help. Seems it would be quite a pain to go back once you have a lot of traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mag7770 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
Should we add Schema.org for Website Articles on our blog page
Hi All, We use schema.org on most of our eCommerce website apart from on our "latest news/blog section" which we have all our how to's ...and other useful articles on . Am I missing a trick here ?.. I have found there is a https://schema.org/Article which I guess we could implement if it's a big help or if there's a better one ? Just wondered peoples thought as whether it is must have from an SEO/ranking point of view thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Multi Langes Blog on Multi languages Website
Hello! I need your Idea. I have my website in 4 languages. for example: domain.com/en domain.com/fr etc.. up to 4 languages. And i run at the moment domain.com/blog but now, i like to invest on content on all languages. What is your idea ? domain.com/en/blog or domain.com/blog/en/ or blog.domain.com/en/ blog.domain.com/fr/ or to use another word instead "blog" for example to use domain.com/en/magazine or domain.com/en/now or another word? what do you prefer me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leadsprofi0 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
About to launch a new e-commerce site need help with anchor text's
Hey guys, I need some advice regarding the keywords I want to target for a new website. The website is e-commerce and is about 60% done but i wanted some advice. home page - http://www.diamondengagement.com/ For link building purposes I only want to target the domain name for the anchor text "diamond engagement" and "diamondengagement.com" for internal pages like .... http://www.diamondengagement.com/engagement-rings/ I want this page to rank for "engagement rings" but that's a very competitive keyword. I was thinking for the first 3 or 4 months I only build links to this page with the domain name again "diamond engagement" and phrase anchor text's using "diamond engagement" than just out right building "engagement rings" or "engagement ring" to start off. What are your thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | harrykabadaian0 -
E Commerce product page canonical and indexing + URL parameters
Hi, I'm having some issues on the best way to handle site structure. The technical side of SEO isn't my strong point so I thought I'd ask the question before I make the decision. Two examples for you to look at. This is a new site http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital. By selecting another page to see more products you get this url string where/p/2. This page also has the canonical tag relating to this page and not the original page. Now if say for example I exclude this parameter (where) in webmaster tools will I be stopping Google indexing the products on the other pages where/p/2, 3, 4 etc. and the same if I make the canonical point to multimeters/digital/ instead of multimeters/digital/where/p/2 etc.? I have the same question applied to the older site http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html. which no longer has an canonical tags at all. The only real difference is Google is indexing http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html?page=2 but not http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital/where/p/2 Thanks for help in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
Would the use of
Hi, I am wondering on you through relevant to SEO in the following situation. I have a "travel" website and obvisouls as part of that I have a whole list of desitinations. So I have a drop down in my page navigation, which lists all my desitinations. At the moment I see have 2 main options to display the lists as follows: 1/. Perfect Anchors, but not good for usability - IE repeating the word "holiday in a list of 100 destinations, looks spammy for one, and when the headline says "Holiday Destinations", then from a use perspective its pretty pointless and takes away from navigation rather than improves it".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
New York Holidays
Las Vegas Holidays 2/. Non Perfect Anchors - But better for usability
New York
Las Vegas So I am thinking - would the use of the title attribute provide a perfect solution?? Or am I wasting my time with this and it is just pointless considering it as an option. EG - what I had in mind was:
3/. Ideal Solution for both SEO and usability??
New York
Las Vegas Thanks for you help in advance.0