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.
Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?
-
Hi there
I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains?
Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2.
It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using:
www.website.com/category1 (for store 1)
www.website.com/category2 (for store 2)
The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing).
I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store).
So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set:
This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank.
Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo?
Another option I was considering was:
www.website.com (for store 1)
store2.website.com (for store 2)
store3.website.com (for store 3)
www.website.com/blog (for blog)
Can this work? Good or bad for seo?
best regards
-
I'd go with
www.mybrand.com/store/category1/subcateory
www.mybrand.com/store/category2/subcateory
www.mybrand.com/store/category3/subcateory...this keeps everything neatly organized for both SEO and the UX (not to mention your content management).
I've been building professional ecommerce websites for 12 years.
Fred
-
It seems to me that everything is going to be relevant to the sport of paintball correct?
here is a great example of how I would set up your site changing the subdomains name to the subfolder name.
if you want to target outside the United States you have more work. But this is where I would do for right now instead of creating a separate store your brand can become a hub for paintball knowledge and paintball guns, accessories etc. that is the way to build a brand. With people being such a fun sport you could probably attract clients by posting videos and use the sport to create a form. For people in your area.
"using the keywords that you are going to use for your sub domains for your subfolders
www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)
www.mybrand.com/paintball = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)
www.mybrand.com/airguns/ = if i decide to sell airguns"
Kinda off-topic but hopefully helpful.
Magento Is kind of slow when not set up properly but very configurable I thought I would give a HHVM configuration you might want to try. https://gist.github.com/blueprintmrk/1e95e2946cabcbb8502d
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thank you all for the replies. So it seems the best option is to go with:
www.mybrand.com as main website for Airsoft and
.../store3 .../store4
thanks
-
Patricks suggestions I think answer your query.
I googled airsoft and it seems strongly related to paintball & airguns. I would not recommend subdomains but keeping it on your main domain. Our experience in fashion is that the more products you have that volume exponentially increases sales. ie go with www.brandname.com/paintball
That said you appear to be leaning towards a sub-domain. As it has completely separate customer bases.
I would try and re-think that strategy and see if there is any way you can live with one URL. You will be dedicated to one purpose not focusing on 2 or 3. Become the expert in airgun sports...
Let me know if have any queries.
-
Hi guys
Thanks for the replys. Let's me put more details. My website so far is specialized in airsoft. My brand is airsoft related and we have hundreds of categories airsoft related and I have a good rank for airsoft related keywords.
So my website is something like www.mybrand.com.
Now I'm planning to work with paintball. Despite they are both "action/shooting sports", they are different, with different customers, different products, hundreds of different categories, and of course, different keywords
I'm using magento and so far the homepage for my website is allways www.mybrand.com ... The page content (categories, products, etc.) are shown depending the store the customer has chosen. (default is airsoft page, but he can change for paintball).
So the idea was:
www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)
paintball.mybrand.com = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)
airguns.mybrand.com = if i decide to sell airguns
tks again
-
Patrick you are fast my friend & just gave him some great resources!
-
I don't know why you would want to create two stores on one website?
If you have a store that is selling vacuum cleaners hypothetically and another that is selling weed wacker's and you do not have any relevance between the two stores e.g. they are for a separate audience.
are you trying to reach the same audience use one website.
To websites even to subdomains
e.g. subdomain1.example.com & subdomain2.example.com will be treated as separate domains by Google.
There are some things you can do to tell Google this is one site and my opinion is if you are going to simply create a headache for yourself by using subdomains un less you have a very good reason?
I would suggest either combining these stores into one business if you are trying to get everything on one domain. Without knowing much more about the project I can tell you that subfolders "example.com/subfolder" tend to work much better then subdomains for passing on domain authority.
You want to create separate businesses create separate websites.
If you want to create one website that sells everything use subfolders unless you are doing geo-targeting and or other reasons that make sense for The end-user who if you are trying to target different stores on the same domain they will get confused.
I hope that helps,
Tom
-
Hi there
Rand had a great Whiteboard Friday on this a few months back called Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO. You should also check out Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?
My first question would be if all the stores fall under the same brand? Or, are they all able to live on their own separate sites with their own branding? Reason being, if you have everything under one domain as subdirectories, everyone can benefit from the domain's authority.
I would review the resources above and see if those can help - there is a ton of great information. Let me know if it doesn't! Good luck!
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
-
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Can a CMS affect SEO?
As the title really, I run www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk and 6 months ago when I first got it it had bad links which google had put a penalty against it so losts it value. However the penalty was lift in Sept, the site corresponds to all guidelines and seo work has been done and constantly monitored. the issue I have is sales and visits have not gone up, we are failing fast and running on 2 or 3 sales a month isn't enough to cover any sort of cost let alone wages. hence my question can the cms have anything to do with it? Im at a loss and go grey any help or advice would be great. thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | manutx0 -
Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
Do knowledge base plugins on a subdomain have seo benefit?
Hi SEO Moz, We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for. We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction? For instance - Our website URL is http://widget.products.com The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better? Any help will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | qdigi0 -
Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?
Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0