Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website

[HireSpace]

There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view.

Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution?

- 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post

- And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post

Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.

[Linda-Vassily]

We are going to do a very similar changeover in the near future and that is how we plan to go about it. I have been looking into it and I don't see any major drawbacks. (But if anyone else has other information--I too would love to hear about it before starting this...)

[LesleyPaone]

I don't think that will work. The reason being if I am understanding correctly, is that the canonical url will never be accessible. I don't know all of the specifics about what Google does on an internal level (like most SEO people) but I don't think it would fly just for the fact that the canonical is never able to be accessed.

Are redirections and htaccess issues the reason you cannot move over to using a sub directory?

[Linda-Vassily]

The original question was about moving a blog from a subdomain to a subfolder (hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain) and using the newly created subfolder as the canonical, which would be accessible.

I do see that in the example the question refers to a 301 from the subfolder to the subdomain, but I think that was just a little mix-up in writing up the example, and it should say that the 301 would be from the old subdomain to the new subfolder. Otherwise yes, that would be circular.

There is also the question of whether you'd need a canonical as well as a 301 (since that would be redundant) but I would probably do it anyway as a sort of belts-and suspenders approach, in case something went wrong. (But I worry too much.)

[HireSpace]

LindaLV, we were actually going to 301 from the path to the subdomain (no content at the path). Could you explain a bit more about how subdomain-to-path 301-redirects would work? Would they not just end up somewhere where there is no content?

Lesley, we use IIS so not htaccess issues as such but, yes, we were having problems in that area.

Thank you both!