Should I host my Ecommerce Software in a Subdomain?
-
We have a single consumer product that we sell through traditional retailers and our website. We have used an ecommerce provider for our website since it's inception 6 years ago. The problem I am facing is website structure.
Our domain points to our ecommerce store, and therefore all content pages are created through the ecommerce platform. However, we can't really do a whole lot in terms of structuring URL's or sub domains. Basically, any content created is given an automatically created URL, and can only be fit in a pre-determined category. There is no way to use sub categories.
Are we better off for use and site structure to host the ecommerce portion of the site in a subdomain, such as store.domain.com, and then manually creating all of our content and other pages? I look at nest.com as sort of template for that. They too only have a few products, so a full ecommerce design isn't really necessary. Are we better off for SEO and ease of use to handle that separately from our overall website structure? Thanks for any help.
-
No problem! Yeah, having a more flexible content management software (i.e. blog/website) with more control sounds like it would make it much easier to optimize the content, url's, and on-page aspects of your SEO.
Do you have any other reservations on this topic?
-
Thanks for the response.
We currently use a subdomain for a blog, because we could not host the blog within the ecommerce software. That is blog.domain.com, and we use that for some content marketing.
Our product line is in the health category, and naturally has quite a few components to it that are worth creating basic content about. We are looking at doing a sort of an A-Z guide that we can host directly on the website, and not the blog.
We do not have any content that would be affected by moving the ecommerce software to a subdomain. We have very few pages that have utilized the ecommerce package's url structure, and any pages that do use it, are ones that have little SEO value. We would like to improve the amount of original content with our main domain along with our blog.
-
At first blush, I'd say this: If I were you, I would host the content on a separate subdomain than your subdomain. I would want the freedom to choose a content management system/blog that gave me the freedom to aggressively pursue on-page SEO/content creation.
But to make sure we leave no stone unturned: do you have any pages in the storefront with SEO value that might make you think twice about jumping to the subdomain?
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
-
Is it OK to put a Blog Post and a Page within the same folder on a Wordpress hosted website?
Our education company website (hosted on wordpress) has evolved into having content on key topics distributed across both blog posts and pages. For example, "top-pharmaceutical-companies" lends itself to being published as a page. However other content "top-pharmaceutical-companies-usa-2016" lends itself to being published as a blog post as it's more temporal in nature. Now we'd like to establish topical domain relevance for the root keyword "pharmaceutical companies" and build a folder www./ourcompany/pharmaceutical-companies/ But when we look through our blog content, we notice we have "Blog Posts" that would be an excellent fit for certain folders within our "Page" url structure. So would it be OK to amend these blogs post urls addresses to place them within the folder structure of the pages.
On-Page Optimization | | GetReskilled0 -
Blocking Subdomain from Google Crawl and Index
Hey everybody, how is it going? I have a simple question, that i need answered. I have a main domain, lets call it domain.com. Recently our company will launch a series of promotions for which we will use cname subdomains, i.e try.domain.com, or buy.domain.com. They will serve a commercial objective, nothing more. What is the best way to block such domains from being indexed in Google, also from counting as a subdomain from the domain.com. Robots.txt, No-follow, etc? Hope to hear from you, Best Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | JesusD3 -
Should we consider redirecting a high ranking subdomain page to our homepage?
My site bluecotton.com sells custom printed t-shirts. Our DA is 46. Our homepage is PA 55. The design studio is where users create their designs. Over the years the design studio has received a lot of fan fair including links from gizmodo and adobe. When I rank against our biggest competitors customink, ooshirts, uberprints.com I find that our domain as a whole doesn't look all that great. However, when I look at the history of our subdomain I see that we are more trusted and credible than all of our competitors. We have 10k links pointing to the design studio. Here is my question. What if I did 301 redirect of bluecotton.com/studio.html to bluecotton.com? Then I created a new url for the DS. This would not cause users any problems. In fact for many they would get more context around what we are trying to do and what we offer. Is this crazy? I never find results in google for the design studio. It always shows our home. That is pretty much what happens to all of our competitors on the higher traffic terms that are driving real sales. So why do i ask? If my subdomain is more valuable becuase of the design studio links then I wonder if I redirected it to the homepage if it would supercharge my homepage and propel is forward in the serps. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | bradwayland0 -
Duplicate product information on ecommerce site
I am planning to launch an ecommerce website soon. There is no way to start with the original content for such a small startup like me. It's pretty expensive to get original content for 1000 (around) products. You know, there are a lot of other costs such as, software licences, modules, developer, designer fees, wholesale purchases, monthly subscription for services etc... This is what i am planning to do: Start with duplicate manufacturers' or amazon's product description, meta tags etc. Then gradually turn them into an original one. I assume, google will give me a low score due to duplicate content but, if i start with duplicate content first, and then change with the original ones over the time, will this change my score?
On-Page Optimization | | Emphi0 -
Keyword Cannibalization/stuffing on an ecommerce category page
Hi, Whats the best way to tackle e-commerce category pages? If you have, say, a category showing 30 pairs of socks, and each of the sock products in the lists has a 'view more' link, a link from the product name and a link from the thumbnail. Naturally each of those links should be the product name - sprinkled with a slight variation, a preceding 'View more on [product name]' or superseded with the shop name, so you dont end up with complete duplicate link titles, you get the idea. But you suddenly end up with 90 instances of links with title tags containing 'socks', which ultimately lead to keyword stuffing/cannibalization - especially as you then move to another category with, say, sports socks showing 40 products and therefore 120 link titles also with the word 'socks' Thought on a postcard please? Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | pretige120 -
Large block of several thousand words on homepage of Ecommerce site - opinions?
I work for a local SEO company who are continually adding content to the home page of clients websites. While i do agree that it is a good idea to add content to the home page and to link to inner pages, the home page of several clients exceeds 6,000 or more words. Every month, an article based on a brand or category (which already has its own page which is optimised with an article) is added to the home page with links to inner pages. I have stressed that it is not a good idea to have so much content on the home page, and even more so that it shouldn't target all the same keywords. I have pointed out that many of the brand and category pages do not rank well for their keywords, whereas in most cases it is the home page which is ranking instead, which i have suggested this is because the home page is too well optimised for those keywords. What are your opinions on this? Are you for or against continually adding content (which already has its own designated page) to the home page of an Ecommerce website? I should also add that this content is within a drop down div box at the footer on some sites and just above the footer on other sites. The category and brand pages also have drop down divs with an article just below the header.
On-Page Optimization | | Kinsel0 -
How do you avoid getting hit for too many links with an ecommerce site?
On my campaign for www.fourcolormagnets.com one of my warnings was "too many on-page links". Is there any thing to do for ecommerce sites? and also, my page www.fourcolormagnets.com/rectangle-sizes.php is listed as having 744 links but, I count nowhere near that number. And idea where this comes from?
On-Page Optimization | | JHSpecialty0 -
Duplicate products across numerous catalogues on an eCommerce site
We run a site that contains many catalogues aimed at different markets. Products can appear in one or more catalogues. The product copy etc will be on the whole similar maybe even identical across those catalogues. So I'm assuming these will be flagged as duplicates? If so is there a way to fix this other than completely re-writing the copy for each catalogue?
On-Page Optimization | | TTS_Group0