Multiple CMS on one website / domain & SEO
-
For a client we would like to work with a content hub, but their website is build on a custom CMS so we are limited in our options and if we aks their web developers they ask crazy prices to help us. So now we have the idea to build the content hub with wordpress and implement it next to their current CMS. for example on www.website.com/contenthub/ .
As far as i know this is technically possible and there are no negative effects regarding SEO as long as we link the two sitemaps together.
Am i right or am i missing something here?
-
When you blend different architectures you WILL get contextual tag collisions (e.g: canonical tags don't work the same across both architectures, or Meta robots tags, or hreflangs). What you are suggesting is probably the best thing you can do, I stand behind WordPress quite firmly, even when it's used to augment another CMS (instead of replacing it). That being said, if you believe you are going to be able to predict all the issues which arise in advance - think again!
Do your best on that front (obviously) but you need to manage your client's expectations. There is going to be some fallout. There is going to be analysis needed. There is going to be dev work needed to create a seamless integration. It's good that you're being diligent and trying to predict everything, but with the complexities of the modern web (the same thing can be coded in thousands of different ways) you really need to accept there will be some problems that will need fixing. You'll need to hold some budget back for that stuff, or you'll be up a gum tree
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
-
Best practices when merging 2 domains with different themes and CMS's?
I have a client with 2 sites - one for an external audience and one for their ~2,000-3,000 employees. The external site (call it acme.com), built on WP with a custom theme, is pretty small. The internal site (call it acmeinternal.com) has TONS of high quality content with incredible engagement metrics, but it's built on a separate CMS with an entirely different custom theme. The problem we're trying to solve now: Can we bring the internal site over to the external domain (acme.com and acme.com/internal, for example) so that client.com can benefit from the quantity and quality of content and behavioral metrics associated with the internal content? The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential client of theirs who would come to acme.com would have no reason to visit acme.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat acme.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts would then live at acme.com/internal/news/post-name. I'm assuming there are reasons why we couldn't have half of the site on one template using one CMS, having certain SEO tags, certain HTML structure, etc where the other half of the site is using a completely different template with a different CMS with different SEO tags, different URL structure etc? To reap the reward of the great content, would we have to essentially recreate the internal site's content on the external site's cms and template? Is it even possible for the domain authority of acme.com to improve based on the engagement on acme.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's virtually zero linking back and forth between acme.com and /internal/? Any advice would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ThinkAOR0 -
Internationalised Domain Names (IDN’s) and SEO
Hi, recently Internationalised Domain Names (IDN’s) are supported. Can anyone give me any indication if there is any SEO benefit in registrering that type of domain names? With Internationalised Domain Names I mean domain names containing "strange characters" like à, é, è, ô, ... . Typical characters used in French, German, Swedish, ... It is now possible to register domainnames (ex. www.hörmann.be). And I was wondering if anyone sees any SEO substance in having this type of domain names.
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Videos for SEO & Profits
Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Client has 3 websites, for various locations & duplicate content is a big issue...Is my solution the best?
Hi guys, I have a client who has 3 websites all for different locations in the same state in Australia. Obviously this is not the best practice but in the meeting he said that each area is quite particular about where they do business. What he means is that people from one area want to do business with a website from that particular area. He has 3 domains and we have duplicate content issues. We are solving these at the moment with the canonical tag however they are redesigning the site soon. My suggestion is that we have 1 domain and sub domains for the other 2 areas. This way the people from that area will see the company is from their area. Also this way we have 1 domain to optimise and build domain authority for. Has anyone else come across this and is my solution the best for this? Thanks! Jon
Technical SEO | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Htaccess help... I moved my blog from a seperate domain to newdomain.com/blog
Hi, I need help with my htaccess file, I've been told. I moved a blog i had hosted somewhere else to a directory on my ecommerce site. I was told i would need to write something to go in the htaccess file so the sites would not become duplicate content, but I'm a novice and have no idea how to write that code. blog moved from www.whosyourmoondoggie.com to www.moondoggieinc.com/blog Please help, or direct me to the right tutorial 🙂 Thanks! KristyO
Technical SEO | | KristyO0 -
2012 SEO/Customer Experience Goals
We are putting together our marketing strategy for 2012 and I was made responsible for putting together the SEO and customer experience goals for 2012. Over the past few months SEO has taken a backseat on the priority list as we have had other marketing goals we wanted to take immediate action on. We don't want to let that happen again. Our sites are rushIMPRINT.com and rushIMPRINT.ca. If anyone out there would be kind enough to take the time, do you see any glaring observations of our sites that need priority? Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Iframes & SEO
I've got a client that wants a site with all content in iFrames. They saw another site they liked & asked if we could do it. Of course we can technically. How big a negative hit would they take with SEO? Is there anything we can do to mitigate it, such as redirects, etc? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0