Effect on SEO for e-commerce on a different domain?
-
We are engaging a vendor to host our LMS and the process for purchasing access to the LMS (product pages/checkout). The vendor can only accomplish this by domain masking (redirecting portal.ourdomain.com to a subdomain on their domain).
Our concern is the SEO implication. Obviously we would prefer the content hosted in a subfolder on our domain for the best SEO outcome, but this isn't an option.
The vendor's domain authority is considerably lower than our own, but they recommend moving our product pages, which are currently hosted on our primary domain, to their subdomain so the checkout process is fully integrated using their product. Several of our product pages rank in the top 10 on Google and we don't want to lose that.
Does anyone have any experience with domain masking and maintaining page rank? My inclination is that moving these high-ranking pages will 1) Hurt our primary domain, and 2) Negatively effect the rank of our product pages.
Thanks in advance,
Beth
-
If your products are ranking well for their target keywords, I would try and avoid changing their URLs (especially to a different domain). Keeping on your own domain also helps improve your product rankings when you grow your main website.
Not sure how the masking will be set up, but in some cases there is no "internal links" since they are all masked by the root masking domain. This would definitely prevent you from building more links (and further improving your rankings).
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
-
301 Old domain with HTTPS to new domain with HTTPS
I am a bit boggled about https to https we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work. What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
E-commerce site blog creating bad signals?
I have an e-commerce site with quite a large (subdirectory) blog attached. The blog is very successful, having attracted about 2 million visitors last year - almost 4 times that of our actual e-commerce pages. Although all content is tangentially relevant, the blog does not convert well directly (mostly because it attracts people at the wrong point in the funnel). Our average bounce rate on e-commerce pages is around 40%, while the blog is about 90% (it answers questions directly with some outbound links); and average page visits to e-commerce pages is 4, compared to 1.3 on the blog. I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. We recently re-released the e-commerce section of the site and despite cleaning up our structure and content, fixing bad URL structure etc., we saw little benefit. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redtalons10 -
How are you taking you e-commerce site forward in 2014
Hi MOZland, With a new (our first e-commerce) client, we're going through a massive learning curve in handling a site of substantial size and complexity for the first time. While we've weeded out most of the on-page stuff that needed sorting, and we're in the process of dumping poor links implemented by previous SEO/online marketing efforts, do you have any suggestions about how to take a big e-commerce site forward in 2014, especially concerning technical pitfalls and link building efforts (and given that guest blogging has become something of a faux pas). Cheers, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Multiple domains?
I do own a domain for my business right now, and would have a few questions, regarding the increase or traffic for my website and getting new business 1. Is it worth to purchase multiple domains, keyword search relevant, to my business? 2. If so how is the best way to use it? : have them redirect to my own website? a specific type of redirect? do I make a separate website for each of them? 3. for ex if the keyword is " tile and grout". I figured would be best to own "tileandgrout.com". How about "tile-and-grout.com"? thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidIRC0 -
Purchase of domain name from a different industry.
Hi I am thinking of acquiring a domain name, although it is currently being used in a completely different industry to the one I hoping to use it for. The site only has 46 links and was registered in 2009. It has a DA of 25, Home PA of 37 and PR of 2 I was just wondering how easy or hard it would be to optimise the website for a completely different industry, i.e. lets say it was initially bought to sell hair-care products and I want to use it to sell electronics. Would I leave the existing links in? Could I use that new disavow tool in webmaster tools to wipe the slate clean and start again? Really haven't come across this before, does anyone have any ideas? Thanks for your time, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors... Can a server migration change rankings? Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thos0030 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
Page load increases with Video File - SEO Effects
We're trying to use a flash video as a product image, so the size increase will be significant. We're talking somewhere around 1.5 - 2mb on a page that is about 400kb before the video. So the increase is significant. There is SEO concern with pages peed and thinking perhaps having the flash video inside an iframe might overcome the speed issues. We're trying to provide a better experience with the video, but the increase in page size, and therefore speed, will be significant. The rest of the page will load, including a fallback static image, so we're really trying to understand how to mitigate the page load speed impact of the video. Any Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0