Running a separate WP theme for the blog section?

[woddyisland]

Hey guys, I’m somewhat new to SEO, but I’ve caught on a lot these past few years. Recently I’ve started working with a web dev who is one of those types that ‘doesn’t believe in SEO’ whatever that means. I’m a content guy myself, but I know enough about SEO to recognize when something is fishy, especially since this particular case has to do with my job.

Here’s the gist of it. The dev wants to keep the main site on a custom CMS, but run the blog on a separate WordPress platform. In other words, nodepositfan.com would be on a custom CMS, but nodepositfan.com/blog would be on a separate WordPress setup. I’ve never seen this done before. I’m wondering how this might affect technical SEO down the road. Will the site be penalized in any way because there are essentially two CMS running on the same domain?

I was thinking of escalating this further up the chain, but I wanted to check with you guys first. Let me know if this dude is a complete hack or am I just not familiar enough with this subject.

[TrayGraig-2433]

@woddyisland This could be a good practice. This is usually implemented when working on large website that has a lot of content. In this way you can manage everything easily.

On the other side, this can affect the SEO somehow. Let's suppose your domain authority is increasing by getting good backlinks and you are getting good traffic. You need to pass that to blog WordPress directory manually. You can add a link to that by using crawl depth equal to 1. In this way you may not lose SEO. Make sure to have the best technical SEO practices. I can help on that if needed.

[LynnPatchett]

@woddyisland Hi!

There is nothing inherently "wrong" with setting things up like this. It used to be done quite a bit a few years back when e-commerce sites (using an e-comm cms of some kind) wanted to add a blog. If the current cms you are running doesn't easily support adding blog functionality then installing wp in a sub directory can be a convenient way to easily get blog functionality added. Google does not really care how you set up your content management, using two cms is perfectly fine - just make sure that technical best practices are implemented (in both cms systems in your case!).

Hope that puts your mind at ease