Instead of the old subdomains, I created landing subfolder pages or "micro sites " which the sub domains are forwarded to. Then each micro site will have pages added to them to assist with local targeting such as testimonials, directions etc.

Hi fello SEOs. I've been working for a large UK artificial grass company since last November. They we're converting badly but ranked no.1 for the keyword artificial grass. Now they convert well but have slipped down to 18. That's one hell of a drop!!! The website is www.easigrass.com

But;

Before I came on board they had their main .com website with about 25 subdomains for each major city in the UK. I switched that in February 2016 to sub folders and the rankings for "artificial grass" have drastically dropped in the SERPs but they now have many more pages being indexed by Google.

I'm simply lost at what has happend. Am I trying too hard to rank or is there a problem that I''m not seeing. Many of the pages have great grades and scores with MOZ, most in the 90's so the on-page SEO doesn't seem to be a problem. I'm wondering if there is something that I'm not seeing.

HELP!!!!

Hi, I know this is an old thread but I have a similar issue. The company I'm currently working with used to have 30+ subdomains all going to different versions of the same website, many with duplicate content. This was creating 30+ different google analytics accounts to look through and all sharing the same ink juice.

Now I have come on board, I have rebuilt the website so that it is one main website with franchisee pages like www.mainsite.com/uk/franchisee-location

Now what should be the best option for the 30+ subdomains that are left? At the moment they are all pointing to their respective page on the new website but I have a developer in the team that is adamant that Google is going to penalise us for having the 30+ subdomains pointing back to urls on the main.com website. I'm not convinced as I think this is a much cleaner way and a better user experience.

My question really is, what is the best action to take with the franchisee subdomains that are out there still in the Google index? Should I keep redirecting them to their new url (www.mainsite.com/uk/frachisee-location) or should they stay as franchiseelocation.mainsite.com and will Google penalise the domain for this?

Many thanks for any advice.

Hi Community, a quick question and just some reassurance for me - We have been building a new website for a large company in the UK. Their previous website was badly made and they had franchisee websites all leading off from the main .com website all under separate sub domains on Wordpress multi site.

cityname1.companyname.com
cityname2.companyname.com
cityname3.companyname.com

and so on...

My question is this - A few of their franchisee microsites on sub domains are currently ranking very well for their chosen search terms. The new companybrand.com website has a dedicated page for each franchisee city/areas and i'm concerned that there may be a loss in rankings if the subdomain of their old 'microsites' gets pointed to their new page (which has better quality content). ie;

city-location.companyname.com to be pointed to www.companyname.com/city-location

Can anyone see any potential hazards in this?

Thanks for any help

Great thanks for the responses Kate. I'll digest what you have sent me and decide there. Thanks again for the help, it's much appreciated

Alex

Thanks for the link Nitin, I will check it out!

Any update on this?

Hi, I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this. I've had a followed link created from http://www.dubaisharks.com/ pointing to my website - http://www.yallarugby.com but in the reports it doesn't show that there is a link coming fro this website. The link has been active for a few months now, but still no record of it.

Any ideas?

Hi Kate, many thanks for sharing that with me. I have completed the questions. I'm still a tad unsure of which direction to go in. The company is selling artificial grass and offers maybe 8 different grass products. The UK network is made up of about 30 cities/areas and each franchisee has their own web page within the main .com site. - so companyname.com/glasgow or companyname.com/belfast

I'm not sure if it's best to keep the international network on the same Wordpress site iecompanyname.com/ea/en for United Arab Emirates network in English or create a separate Wordpress website, hosted from a separate folder on the .com server and repeat site structure but change the content for the UAE etc..

Does that make sense? If you have any advice that would be great. By the way, your questions advise that I 'Take the Integrated Approach'

Many thanks

Alex

Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network.

I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin.

So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee?

Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take.

Thanks Moz Community

Using the words of a great SEOer... Annielytics:

"Search engines use the H1 tag to interpret what a page is about, much the same way readers of a magazine use article titles to get an idea of what an article is about. When pages are missing H1 tags, it’s harder for both visitors and search engines to decipher what the page is about. The H1 tag should contain a judicious use of the keyword(s) you’re targeting the page for. Be careful to make the language natural and not keyword stuffed. If you have to decide between user experience and SEO, go with user experience."

I would just concentrate on using the H1 tag to add value to the users experience. I guess they will already know that they are on your website, so no need to remind them of this in the H1. As Annie mentions above, use it like you would if it was an article in a magazine. You wouldn't repeat the magazine name within an article title already in the magazine.

also, the 'beginners guide' link that Matt Roney has shared is a great resource!!

Hope that helps!

Hi Ryan, I have now since moved the website to the old root folder / instead of /devs/. I have also removed the old .htaccess that redirected my domainname.com to domainname.com/devs/.

For some strange reason though I'm still getting the "?route=" whenever i'm doing a new 301 redirect. You can see my htaccess below:

1.To use URL Alias you need to be running apache with mod_rewrite enabled.

2. In your opencart directory rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

For any support issues please visit: http://www.opencart.com

Options +FollowSymlinks

Prevent Directoy listing

Options -Indexes

Prevent Direct Access to files

<filesmatch ".(tpl|ini|log)"="">Order deny,allow
Deny from all</filesmatch>

SEO URL Settings

RewriteEngine On

If your opencart installation does not run on the main web folder make sure you folder it does run in ie. / becomes /shop/

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
RewriteRule ^googlebase.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_base [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !..(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|js|css)
RewriteRule ^([^?]) index.php?route=$1 [L,QSA]

Additional Settings that may need to be enabled for some servers

Uncomment the commands by removing the # sign in front of it.

If you get an "Internal Server Error 500" after enabling any of the following settings, restore the # as this means your host doesn't allow that.

1. If your cart only allows you to add one item at a time, it is possible register_globals is on. This may work to disable it:

php_flag register_globals off

2. If your cart has magic quotes enabled, This may work to disable it:

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off

3. Set max upload file size. Most hosts will limit this and not allow it to be overridden but you can try

php_value upload_max_filesize 999M

4. set max post size. uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value post_max_size 999M

5. set max time script can take. uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value max_execution_time 200

6. set max time for input to be recieved. Uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value max_input_time 200

7. disable open_basedir limitations

php_admin_value open_basedir none

redirect 301 /buy-online http://www.foliages.ae/

Hi Ryan, I did this set up but I can't seem to get my 301 redirects to work properly. This is what I have:

www.foliages.ae now points to www.foliages.ae/devs/

But when I try and redirect a page to a new one it doesn't work. For example:

www.foliages.ae/buy-online/artificial-trees-dubai/artificial-olive-trees should point to http://www.foliages.ae/artificial-trees/olive but instead I get http://www.foliages.ae/?_route_=artificial-trees-dubai/artificial-olive-trees

I have the following .htaccess code in the root folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?foliages.ae$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/devs/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /devs/$1
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?foliages.ae$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ devs/index.php [L]

And in my /devs/ folder .htaccess I have:

1.To use URL Alias you need to be running apache with mod_rewrite enabled.

2. In your opencart directory rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

For any support issues please visit: http://www.opencart.com

Options +FollowSymlinks

Prevent Directoy listing

Options -Indexes

Prevent Direct Access to files

<filesmatch ".(tpl|ini|log)"="">Order deny,allow
Deny from all</filesmatch>

SEO URL Settings

RewriteEngine On

If your opencart installation does not run on the main web folder make sure you folder it does run in ie. / becomes /shop/

RewriteBase /devs/
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
RewriteRule ^googlebase.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_base [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !..(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|js|css)
RewriteRule ^([^?]) index.php?route=$1 [L,QSA]

Additional Settings that may need to be enabled for some servers

Uncomment the commands by removing the # sign in front of it.

If you get an "Internal Server Error 500" after enabling any of the following settings, restore the # as this means your host doesn't allow that.

1. If your cart only allows you to add one item at a time, it is possible register_globals is on. This may work to disable it:

php_flag register_globals off

2. If your cart has magic quotes enabled, This may work to disable it:

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off

3. Set max upload file size. Most hosts will limit this and not allow it to be overridden but you can try

php_value upload_max_filesize 999M

4. set max post size. uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value post_max_size 999M

5. set max time script can take. uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value max_execution_time 200

6. set max time for input to be recieved. Uncomment this line if you have a lot of product options or are getting errors where forms are not saving all fields

php_value max_input_time 200

7. disable open_basedir limitations

php_admin_value open_basedir none

redirect 301 /buy-online http://www.foliages.ae
redirect 301 /buy-online/artificial-trees-dubai/artificial-olive-trees http://www.foliages.ae/devs/artificial-trees/olive

Any ideas?

Thanks Ryan, I shall give it a go and let you know how I get on.

Hi Ryan, I'm running an ecommerce site (opencart) on the /devs/ folder so will that cause me problems do you think if I just copy the files over to the root?

If I follow the link you gave me (bluehostforum) it appears all I need to do is add the code in my .htaccess file. Do I still need to move all the files from my /devs/ folder if I tackle this from the .htaccess file code?

Hi am in the process of developing my new site domainname.com/devs/ but my current site is still on www.domainname.com/

When the time comes to launch the new site (in devs folder) I want to change the main root folder to this devs folder.

Is there a correct system to do this with as little pain as possible. I know I will need to go through all of my pages and make sure they are 301 redirected to the new folder, but not sure what the correct way to tackle the domain name root folder change.

Any help would be awesome!

Thanks

Thanks for this guys. Some great help and points made.

Alex

Hi, I have a brochure style website mycompanyname.com that gives lots of detail about my company and what services we offer etc. I am soon going to be adding an commerce solution (haven't decided on opencart or paid such as shopify yet).

I was wondering... is the best way to have a shop to have it on a completely separate domain like mycompanynameonlinestore.com or simply add it to a sub folder on my main brochure style website like mycompanyname.com/onlinestore

Many thanks to anyone who takes the time to help me make up my mind!!!

Thats great thanks for your help guys.

Alex