Changing URL to a subdomain?
-
Hi there,
I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce.
I am now separating out the content so that;
1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site
2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site.
What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search?
Many thanks
Mike
-
If it's an off the shelf store software that you're using, they mostly let you choose the location that you want your store to sit in, so be sure to check that out.
Alex
-
Cool thanks
-
Hey Mike, that's all going to depend on which ecommerce shop you're using and if they are able to do a reverse proxy like that. Otherwise, subdomain is how you need to go.
-
Thanks John - that's really helpful.
Do you know how I go about setting the eCommerce site as www.footballshirtcollective.com/store?
Many thanks
Mike
-
Hi there -
This is a pretty common setup for ecommerce sites with both content and products. Of course, I'd always recommend doing something like www.footballshirtcollective.com/store/ with your product URLs there, which would likely allow you to exclude advertisers/advertising from those pages.
If you do want to use the subdomain and are already committed to that, then there are definitely ways to make it work very well for SEO.
A subdomain is basically a separate website. You need to do everything for it that you would do for the www subdomain (www is technically a subdomain, after all), including but not limited to:
- Verify in Search Console
- Have GA set up
- Crawlable site structure
- Sitemaps
- Well-formatted URLs (lowercase, hyphens, etc)
Since you are moving the URLs from www to store., you also need to implement direct and correct 1:1 301 redirects from the www. to the store. URLs. DO NOT do a blanket redirect of all the current ecomm www URLs to the base of store.footballshirtcollective.com.
Hope that helps!
Self-promotion - if you're looking for help with migrating your content between platforms, I have people on Credo who can help you - https://www.getcredo.com/bizverticals/ecommerce-platform-migrations/
-
Hi. Thanks for the answer.
I had to seperate them as I have advertisers interested in advertising on the content but they wouldn't on the ecommerce site.
How would I set up the subfolder? How long do you think it'll take to build organic search to the site again?
Thanks
Mike
-
Just on this using a sub folder may be a better option.
-
Hi Mike,
I personally wouldn't use a subdomain for this. I would just separate my site out as it is under one URL. I don't like using subdomains and probably would try to avoid it, I have yet to read a success story when using them.
If you design your site well then I don't see why you cant host both under one domain, what was your reason for using them in the first place?
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
-
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
"Category" word in URLs of blog is it SEO Friendly URL ??
Hello respected community members, I saw many times that "Category" word comes in URL of blog. So my que is that is this negative for SEO or Positive. & if we don't wanna to come CATEGORY in URL how can we remove while URL Optimization ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourabhrana390 -
Rewriting URL
I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything. I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled. Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect? If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Subdomain and domain authority
I have Domain A (main content site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 91, and Domain B (blog of the first site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 82. I'm merging the blog into the main domain. Would it be best to keep it as a subdomain, or under a directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smorrison0 -
Can your site be penalized for changing the url structure and if so how long till you get back?
I'm doing well on yahoo and bing and the only reason I can think of for why I'm not showing on Google is because I changed the url structure a couple of months ago. I have solid on and off page done for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deciph220 -
New AddThis URL Sharing
So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser. It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment. But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link. What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey0