Process to move blog from subdomain on Wordpress, to subfolder on BigCommerce store
-
Hi
Having weighed up all the angles, it's time to bite the bullet and move our blog from a subdomain to a subfolder on our ecommerce store. But as someone new to SEO I am struggling to find the correct process for doing this properly for our situation. Can anyone help?
I have outlined what I have learned so far in 10 steps below to hopefully help you understand my situation, where I am at and what I am struggling with. Advice, tips and suggested further reading on all/any of the 10 points would be great.
Some quick background
The blog is on Wordpress, and on a subdomain of our store (blog.store.com). It is four years old, with 80 original posts we want to move to a subfolder of the store (store.com/blog).
The store has been built using BigCommerce, and has also been active for four years.
Both the blog and the store exist as properties within our Google Search Console.
The 10 steps required for the move, based on research so far, and the associated questions
1 Prepare new site: which I am guessing means reproducing all of the content over at the new subfolder location (store.com/blog)?
2 Setup errors for any pages not being transferred: I have no idea how to do this!
3 Make sure analytics is working for the new pages: it should be as the both the site the pages are moving to a subfolder of is already running with analytics and has been for years - is this a safe assumption?
4 Map all URLs being moved to their new counterparts: is this just record keeping? In a spreadsheet? Or is it a process I don't yet understand??
5 Add rel='cannonical' tags: while I understand the concept of these, I have no idea how to implement them properly here!
6 Create and save new sitemaps: as both the blog.store.com and store.com exist in Google Search Console already, can I just refresh the sitemap for store.com/blog once the subfolder is created to achive this?
7 Setup and test 301 redirects: these can be created in BigCommerce for the new pages in the store.com/blog subfolder, and will refer back to the blog.store.com URLs the pages came from - is this the right way to do this? I am still learning here and know enough to know how much this can matter, but not enough to fully grasp the intricacies of the process
8 Move URLs simultaneously: I have no idea what this means or how to achieve it! is this just for big site moves? Does it still apply to 80 blog posts shifting from a subdomain to a subfolder on the same root? If so, how?
9 Submit a change of address in Google Search Console: This looks simple enough although Google ominously warn:
‘Don't use this tool unless you are moving your primary website presence to a new address’
Which makes me wonder how simple it really is - my primary website in this case is the store, which is not moving. address But does 'primary' here simply mean the individual property with search console? I am going in circles on this one!
10 Configure the old blog on the subdomain to redirect people and engines to the new pages: I thought the 301 redirects and rel='cannonical' stuff did that already? What did I miss??
For anyone still here, thanks for making it this far and if you still have the energy left, any advice would be great!
Thanks
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
-
WordPress Themes and SEO
I am helping out a client with updating their website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cangelmarketer
The theme they currently have hasn't been updated in ages (I am going to guess years). Would there be a difference in updating to the most recent version of their theme and changing them to a completely different theme? Or because they update in the current theme is so large anyway, it won't make a difference in terms of SEO. The reason I ask is that they don't know their Themeforest details to log in and download the most recent version of the theme, so they would have to re-purchase it, and with the hosting, they have access to a range of themes includes in their package. Thanks0 -
Subfolder cannibalization
Hello, I looked through the forum but couldn't find an answer so here is my question: A client have 2 subfolders that are selling the same things for example Furnitures, Office Furniture, Bedroom Furniture, etc. The website looks like this : www.website.com/subfolder1/ www.website.com/subfolder2/ But it's like 2 diferents brand, just that it sells the same kind of product. The company wants to put evereything in subfolder1 and stop the subfolder2, which mean stop the second brand. But the thing is that right now the subfolder2 have better positions in SEO than subfolder1 for most of the Keywords. How could I make all the internet traffic goes from the subfolder2 to the subfolder1 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sodimaccl
A 301 redirection could do the trick ? In addition of improving the SEO (Title, H1, Meta, etc) of the subfolder1 ? Thanks for your help.0 -
Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing The situation is as follow: For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them. Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven87
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.com So I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are: no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages) duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client) impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console. Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google. Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of? The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected. So my questions basically are: 1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed?0 -
To subdomain or to subfolder, that is the question.
Hi All, So I have a client that has two restaurants that they are wanting two sites for. Right now they have one site for their two locations that ranks pretty well for some bigger keywords for their style of food. With them wanting two sites, i'm struggling on whether we should just build them all within one site and just use separate folders on that site restaurant.com/location1 & restaurant.com/location2 with a landing page sending you to each, or if we should split it into subdomains. The content will be roughly the same, the menus are identical, i think each branch is just owned by a different family member so they want their own site. I keep leaning towards building it all into one site but i'm not sure. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insitemoz10 -
Fourth and Third Level Subdomain Interlinking
Hi everyone. I have a hopefully interesting client question I wanted to pose. I do work for a company with three distinct locations that have unique offerings, service areas, etc. I wouldn't want to see the three locations as subfolders (example company.com/locationone/, company.com/locationtwo/) of one site. They are large and unique presences. Fortunately, they did not organize their locations in such a way, and currently have their locations organized as subdomains, as in locationone.company.com, locationtwo.company.com. I might have preferred locationone.com, locationtwo.com, etc., but that is what I am working with. Their developer has been building new content on fourth level domains, as in newcontent.locationone.company.com and newcontent2.locationone.company.com. In one case one of these fourth level domains also contains a different but parallel checkout process to the one already present on third level domain locationone.company.com. I am looking for advice on how to interlink these sites, and whether to discourage them from building out new fourth level domains (newcontent3.locationone.company.com, etc.) or even to get rid of the current fourth level domains altogether. I'm not sure if the fact that they're subdomains and not subfolders matters as much as it used to. Is this a case of subdomain phobia, or are my concerns justified? Any special advice on dealing with interlinking across fourth, third, and second level domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rlevers0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0 -
Guest Blogging Funny Problem!
Well it made me laugh and then cry a little after anyway. I have a keyword which is ranking page 1 position 7, I created a really nice article with content relevant to the keyword maybe around 600 words. I spent maybe half hour researching blogs on myblogguest looking for one that was based in the same country, had really good mozbar stats, even checked out how quickly other posts got indexed. I put 2 anchor text links in the article and managed to get the blogger to post the article. Next day checked the rankings and the post on the blog is now position 7, and has knocked me to position 8. I'm tempted to ask the blogger to change the title tag not to include my targeted keyword. Anyone got an advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
What to do with WordPress generated pages?
I'm an SEOmoz Newbie and have a very specific question about the auto generated WordPress Pages. SEOmoz caught and labeled the auto generated WP pages as Crawl Warnings like: Long URL - 302 - Title Element to Long - Missing Meta Description Tag - Too Many On-Page Links So I have learned the lesson and have now made those pages "no follow" / "no idex." HOWEVER, WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ONES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INDEXED? Do I... 1. Just leave them as is a hope they don't hurt me from an SEO perspective? 2. Redirect them all to a relevant page? I'm sure many people have had this issue. What do you think? Thanks Dominic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amorbis0