Pros/Cons on Where to Host Stores for Ecommerce Solution Provider (subdomain vs. throwaway domain, etc)
-
Hello! Does anyone have any experience with the pros/cons for where to host storefronts as an ecommerce solution provider. I'm looking for a recommendation on where to house the stores/websites people create with our software (think of us like a shopify/squarespace).
What are the pros & cons of creating stores on the main domain name “brand.com” versus buying a new top level domain name who’s only purpose will be to hold all the subdomains, such as “mybrand.com”, or even “.my.brand.com”.
store.brand.com <— subdomain our our primary domain
store.my.brand.com <— subdomain of a subdomain
store.mybrand.com <— subdomain of a throw-away domainWeebly/Squarespace/Tictail go with the first option (store**.weebly.com** and store.squarespace.com). Shopify goes with the 3rd option (store.myshopify.com)
Are there any advantages or disadvantages to one or the other? Am I missing any other options? Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for the help here Matt! We've had issues in the past with penalties from unnatural linking networks derived from subdomains, so that will certainly be a focus here. Appreciate it!
-
You should definitely start with an intense discussion we had on Inbound about subdirectories/subfolders. Not because you're asking the subfolder question but rather there's a LOT of really good info about subdomains for SEO.
In general, most people (but not all) agree that subdomains act as their own separate websites. Since all 3 of your options are basically the same (subdomains) then we can just jump ahead a bit.
Choice 2 seems ... redundant ... to me? I don't see the benefit.
Choice 1 vs 3 comes down to do you use your own domain or a throwaway. I would suggest that since you don't know how Google will treat them in the future, a throwaway is probably preferable. I know Wordpress uses a simple subdomain, as did a lot of older CMS' but I think the trend now is to not give Google hardly ANY chance to mess up your SEO by combining it with others. Even though that's not how it seems to currently work, that could change tomorrow. If it's on a separate, throw away domain it really can't be.
The only concern with that is to make sure you don't interlink all your client sites to yours through things like a footer link. You could very quickly and very artificially bank up tons of external links with a simple Theme by Our Company link. It's on a separate domain so those would add up very quickly as external links.
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
-
Endless Scrolling and prev/next
Hi, We have a new website on https://www.neakriti.gr We have asked for endless scrolling between our articles, so when we get at the end of one article, the next loads. Looking at the produced html code I saw the articles contain and to other articles. When I asked the development team why this happens, I got a reply that its needed for the endless scroll of the articles. But to my understanding "prev" and "next" is only used on pagination cases, and endless scroll between articles has nothing to do pagination. Here is an example article
Branding | | ioannis.anifantakis
https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1524252/fthinoporinos-o-kairos-tin-tetarti-stin-kriti-deite-analutika-tin-prognosi/ If you "view html code" on that article you will see this "next", "prev" declarations to other articles. Can anyone please let me know if the declaration of "prev" and "next" articles should stay or if I should ask the development team to remove it? Thanks0 -
Domain Transition: Leaving low quality content behind
We're in the initial stages of planning a domain transition / rebrand. We're considering 301'ing our low and high(er) quality content split to two different domains. One for the low quality, one for our high. Best practices normally tell you to not split your content between between multiple domains. However, what if the majority of pages on your site are thin/outdated, and attract low volume/long tail? Does it make sense to bring that low quality/volume content over the new domain, when you know you'll never have the resources (nor would it make sense to) mass improve the quality of these pages? I'm concerned the quality of these pages are affecting our overall domain authority. Some background on our site/business: Current site has 15,000+ pages. 98% of our site is a product directory of professional/enterprise business management software. While a small handful of our product pages have quality original long form content (maybe 50-100), most of the product pages are a combination of: thin, outdated, overly sales-y content provided directly from product developers, and/or catch only very low-volume/long tail organic traffic. 95% of our pages attract fewer than 20 visits/mo, 90% of our pages attract fewer than 10 visits/mo. We have a small business of about 10 employees. Most of which don't maintain our site. It's unrealistic for us to genuinely improve the quality of that many pages. Nor does it make sense to improve most of these pages, as they'll attract only very low volume keywords. Individually these low quality pages don't bring in many customers, but on aggregate they do. 70% of our organic conversions come from pages with less than 20 visits/mo. A few questions: Is this content negatively affecting our domain authority in any way? While I don't believe we've been hit with a penalty, Google knows that on average our pages aren't very helpful to many users, and I'm concerned that affects our ability to rank with pages that matter. None of the content was mass produced in any form of scraping efforts or anything nefarious like that. Would there be any negative/positive affect to offloading these low quality/volume pages to a different domain during the rebrand?
Branding | | dsbud0 -
I want to forward/redirect users from domain.us to domain.com.us (preferred domain)
Let me know where should I start. I heard this is something you can do in your domain name or hosting service. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | esiow20130 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword? Part 2
Last month I have posted a question about choosing the right domain name for a website which is currently popular in india, which also needs to be popular in USA. Here's the link to that question (http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-ok-to-choose-a-domain-name-with-brand-name-followed-by-keyword) As you can see the question got 3 helpful responses from experts. But if you scroll down and see.. there is a 4th response which I myself posted throwing some extra doubts, (This was left unanswered.) Could someone please check that thread and clarify my doubt ( the 4 response)
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Do .CO domains rank up just as easy as a .com domain?
I have ran across a very good .CO domain and am thinking about making it into one of our main websites. I have no experience with them. I have used/bought just about every other domain type out there, but I have never used a .CO yet. The domain I was able to purchase was seobusiness.co for $5.00 - regardless if I am able to use it for our main brand if they don't rank up the same, I will use it for something else. The site isn't up yet btw, so no need visiting it... The keyword gets 1600 exact hits a month give or take a few of course - thats just the Google tool estimate. Matt Cutts says that they can rank up the same, but I am looking for more than this. Does anyone have some proof that .co's can rank up? I hate to put 2-3 months of solid work into this to rank it up for SEO business and it doesn't want to rank due to the .co. Thanks in advance for your time.
Branding | | MarketingOfAmerica0 -
Domain Authority Mind = Blown
Hi guys, I've focused on building my domain authority for a while now, it's stll low but i'm sure it'll increase. My competitors have 0 backlinks to most of there products which is good, i guess. However they have a domain authority of around 70-80. Which is really high. There product pages get a page authority from 60-70+ which means they rank very high with no backlinks. I can easily out rank them by getting backlinks but it's a very time consuming and costs quite a bit of money to out source it. My question is... is it really all about page/domain authority? I can't see any other factors that allow them to rank high for the products. Also my mind is blown as you can create a blog with a high Domain authority such as Wordpress but that doesn't mean your blog will instantly rank high right? Is there something i'm missing with there website? I'm so confused right now! Any help would be great. Main competitor is: http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk along with http://www.cartridgesave.co.uk (Stinkyink to be a member here actually)
Branding | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
Anybody use Twibbon to promote a website/cause/event?
I stumbled across Twibbon today - it's a service that basically creates an easy way for you to brand your Twitter/Facebook pictures, and to allow others to promote your cause as well. I'm not sure if I'm late to get on board here or if this is a relatively new thing, but it seems pretty cool. I can definitely see this really working out for promoting philanthropic causes. It would also work really well for events - imagine if every speaker at an SEO conference used Twibbon to brand their Twitter/Facebook? I think it would really help with branding, for both individuals and businesses.
Branding | | AnthonyMangia1 -
Domain Name Masking Redirect for Brandname to Keyworded Domain
Hi mozzers I have 2 domain names, brandname.com and keywordname.com and but have a question related to web vs print marketing on deciding which domain to use or redirect. We already have established unique content first on the Keywordname.com site over the last 6 months and it has started to climb well in google rankings. But now we'd like to do some print advertising and think it would make more sense to use Brandname.com when refering to our website. So the 2 question are: Should I 301 redirect brand.com to keyword.com (preferred as all content and rankings on keyword.com) or vice versa, as I realize I can only have one site to avoid duplicate content. And is it possible to use domain name masking on brand.com if redirecting to keyword.com to avoid risking our rankings, or is masking bad for seo? Thanks!
Branding | | emerald0