Move blog and keep the seo competence

[shanky1]

I have my blog at www.blog.practo.com and wish to shift it to practo.com/blog since from an SEO point of view I dont think having good content on blog.practo.com is going to help.

Without having to move the WP instance to /blog can I have all my urls directing as www.practo.com/blog/articles and still work to update the blog from www.blog.practo.com

Is this possible and advisible?

[Highland]

For bulk 301s you really want something like a .htaccess, that can globally instruct the web server where to send the traffic.

Incidentally, subdomains are now considered part of the root domain. Google said so. So you don't HAVE to move from your current structure if you don't want to.

[shanky1]

I read a couple of posts right here and they suggested that sub domains are still not give that much importance when you are looking at serious link building and working with content around keywords to compete in the search engine race..

Now I am confused. Since I was beginning to have this shifted and then start writing down my content all over again.

Can anyone suggest something which works better SEO wise . Sub domains or internal sub directories.

[Highland]

If you were starting from scratch, I'd say do the subdirectory. But there's a cost associated with moving from an existing URL and the thing I preach is that, if you move, the reward needs to be better than the cost. In this case, I don't think you can say that. You can still move, but you'll lose some ranking short-term.

Do you see some long term gain I'm missing?

[shanky1]

So here is the picture.

We are on blog.practo.com and have roughly about 25 posts on it. Also we have Traffic  Sources>All traffic> and I have a advanced segment where I am excluding the branded keyword of our firm" Practo" I see that very few organic searches have come in to the blog. That too not converting to anything.

What I tend to understand if I move it then will the google analytics considerably?

The issue in analytics I have is when I am excluding that keyword still in the  Secondary dimension: Keyword I can see the branded keyword which I excluded?

Can you help out why?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Shashank,

This is a great question. In almost all circumstances, it's better to host your blog on the same subdomain as your main website. In your case, that would be www.practo.com/blog/

If you only have 25 articles on your blog at this point, I think it's worth it to port the whole thing over. Fortuneatly with Wordpress, the migration process is fairly easy.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress (check out the instructions for moving your installation on the same server)

This will take a little work, but in the long run will be worth it. Make sure to 301 redirect your old post to the new URLs, either through htaccess or another method.

Not quite sure what problems you're having with GA. Feel free to clarify if you'd like me to touch on it.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

[shanky1]

Hi Cyrus. Thanks for the revert. I would keep that in mind.

I am  going through a critical phase where maybe your understanding could help out.

Please see below -

We have our site www.practo.com (our 1st product site)

We have our blog as blog.practo.com

We plan to have our main site in a months time from now as www.ray.practo.com(this is a new product site ie: our second product

The Issues - I will then need to direct all my existing traffic from www.practo.com to www.ray.practo.com (since product on site one is moving to product site 2 - ie:ray.product.com

Keeping in mind SEO and also since I will be generating new content via our Wordpress instance what are the best ways to do this so that google does not have difficulty in find out content and we dont screw our SEO big time.

1. Would it be good if I put the Wordpress instance as ray.practo.com/ blog(wordpress instance comes in here in the directory) /  article-url

2.Would it be better with www.practo.com / ray(our new product's site) / blog/article-url

I am using wordpress to roll out all our new SEO based content on various keywords and topics for which we want traffice - primary reasons are since we needed a content generation cms platform so that we dont have to deal with html pages and every time publish those content pages via a developer. - I hope this is good for me?

Please guide accordingly.

Thanks for the time!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Let me keep this simple by saying I think you're digging a hole by moving anything to a subdomain.

Instead, you might want to consider launching your 2nd product at www.practo.com/ray. This preserves your domain authority and will make it much easier for your new product to rank.

By moving it to a subdomain, you are essentially starting over.

From a usability point of view, there is very little difference.

Rand wrote a good article on this awhile back that's still very relevant today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I hope this makes sense. Keep things simple for yourself and keep everything on the same subdomain, including your blogs. Everything will have an easier time ranking, and it will save you a ton of trouble down the road.

[shanky1]

Sure so I did read that and somewhere microsites popped up - which left me wondering that for new product launch microsites are also good enough. So I wanted to clarify that .

On the other hand for all our open page content we are planning to use wordpress itself. - would this be the best way to go about it?

In my GA - I was very enthusiastic to know for a particular content landing page through what keywords did users land there? Is that possible if yes - then probably I don't know where to find it - I am looking under Content> Landing Pages

Thanks