Company Blog at a different URL

[PTCCTV]

Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc.   However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect.  This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically.

Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components.  Last week,  I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice.  However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy.

Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this.  Any ideas?

Other recommendations appreciated as well!

Platinum-CCTV(dot)com

[Sharla]

I would move the blog onto the mainsite so you'll get the benefit of regular updates on your primary URL and avoid the possible penalties for having too many links from another site on the same cblock.  Use redirects to get your traffic headed from the old to the new, and in the future, add new content under your main site.

[PTCCTV]

Definitely something that we would like to do, but unfortunately our current shopping engine does not support us moving the Wordpress blog over onto the site.  The best we could do would be to name it as a daughter domain ie blog.xxx.com.

The sites are hosted on different servers now, so the links are really coming from a differenct c-block I believe.

We would love to have the blog on the main for the fresh content regularly, but without a major shift in platform I dont think that is possible.  any other Ideas?

[Milian]

Can you you not install wordpress into a separate folder within the domain?

e.,g:  www.example.com/blog/

You should be able to do this without having to incorporate it into the current shopping cart site.  What eCommerce platform are you on , and what kind of server?

[ThompsonPaul]

There is a server functionality specifically created to perform what you're talking about, Michael. It's called a reverse proxy, and it allows a site hosted on any server to be "proxied" into another site so it appears to visitors as if it's a subdirectory of the main site (even though actually hosted somewhere else). So a visitor and search engines would see yoursite.com/blog, even though the WordPress install is on a different server.

Here's a MOZ Blog post discussing it's use for exactly the kind of purpose you're referring to:  http://moz.com/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

There's a specific module in Apache webservers called mod_proxy for creating this functionality. It's also available under Windows IIS. It's not trivial to set up properly - you'll want an experienced systems admin and careful QA testing - but the end result is exactly what you're looking for. Your blog and all its content and links will function as an internal component of your primary site, with all the SEO benefits that entails.

Would that solve your problem?

Paul

[PTCCTV]

Thank you, That is something I am definitely looking into now!

Still waiting to see if our host will allow this configuration.  We will see, but it seems like that is exactly what I need.

Thank you for taking the time to help

[ThompsonPaul]

You're welcome, and good luck! Let us know how it goes...

P.