Outsourcing development to external agencies

[Getz.pro]

Ok, having external developers does not intrinsically negatively impact SEO.

Is the functionality proprietary? If not, why not copy the code from all external hosting accounts to your main hosting account?

[StalkerB]

First, bringing these pages under the same hosting account should not be an issue as this is simply a copy and paste of folders. Unless the functionality is strictly limited to the hosting company.

If the functionality is proprietary and can't be hosted with the partentcharity, I would leave things as they are until you can afford to re-build the site and just cross link as needed.

Yeah, this was the tl;dr for mine I should have put in Sums it up perfectly.

[tgraham]

Yep - you've both got it!

This was the question I needed answering:

Just to be clear though, you cannot have different parts of a site hosted on different servers, so parentcharity.com/sales andparentcharity.com/community MUST be hosted on the same siteserver.

and this is the main problem as the function is proprietary:

_If the functionality is proprietary and can't be hosted with the partentcharity, I would leave things as they are until you can afford to re-build the site and just cross link as needed. _

So we're in a quandry, we can't afford / haven't got the internal developer time to build a bespoke community site and the external functionality is proprietry so we can't bring it in-house and are therefore getting little search value from our subdomained community.

[Getz.pro]

I can't see it drastically hurting you as long as you keep them as subdomains.

iFrames will work if moving to subfolders as long as the page that contains the iFrame has other content and the iFrame resides within the page. If not, the iFrame page (external) won't bring any juice to your page/site.

Still, I would keep as subdomains and cross link when naturally applicable.

Then talk to Kris about getting a new site redone : ) I am sure there are developers in your area that would volunteer as you would provide them with volunteer hours they can write off at the end of the year. And someone local should be empathetic to your cause and you can always bribe with a backlink to their site

[tgraham]

Thanks so much for all of the great information. This really helps in clarifying my understanding of separate sites, subdomains and hosting. Now just need to work out how to pursuade the business to start building a new community platform internally.

[tgraham]

By the way anyone coming to this post might not understand  tl;dr literally means, "Too long; didn't read". I had to look it up!

[Getz.pro]

LOL and I thought it was a typo

[Getz.pro]

You are welcome!

[StalkerB]

So we are asking them to integrate their sites into ours for an extra fee but what we are trying to find out is whether or not this is worth it in terms of search equity for our site if we only lose visitors once they have arrived at our site and are then directed off...?

So are you saying (for example) you want to use Flickr for image hosting, Google Calendar for events planning, Proboards for a forum, Cafepress for a store, that kind of thing? And are worried linking to all this offsite content means you're losing the value having the content on your proper domain would provide?

[tgraham]

Hi Barry - yes that's pretty much it.  The tools that we're using aren't as generic as Flickr and Google Calendar, they're more refined for our business, but you get the gist of it.  Our business relies on promoting content to visitors through search and we're worried that by satisfying visitor needs by sending them off to externally created communities and feature rich events platforms our own content won't be promoted by the search engines which is the sole reason for having a site!

[StalkerB]

Okay, I follow now. And the developers have suggesting putting these tools/content in iFrames on the site so people link to the page on your site rather than directly to the site the content is hosted on.

Well, as for whether iFrames would 'work' it would depend on what the content was and if people needed to link to specific URLs, but if it was the sort of thing that people could still get the functionality of but not need to deep link, then that may work.

If you do go down this route please make sure there is some actual content on the page (Google won't see the stuff in the iFrame as being on page content), so add a description of what users can do on the page, a banner with some good alt text, etc.

So, again, please speak about the specifics with someone, but embedding external content in iFrames could be a reasonable (if not great) workaround for you if you can convince people to link to the page the iFrame is on and not the content in the iFrame.

[tgraham]

Ok Barry thanks but what about time on page and visitor numbers?  Who would Google credit with those numbers?

[tgraham]

Ooops posted twice - one won't delete so amended this one!

[StalkerB]

The page on your domain that has the iFrame in it would get credit for both (assuming you have analytics on it :D).

The visitor would actually be on your site and the iFrame is just a window to the other site where they can see the content.