You may have noticed that we have moved the SEOptimise blog away from the subdomain blog.seoptimise.com and redirected this to www.seoptimise.com/blog.
The reason for this change is because inbound links to subdomains are treated differently to links which point to the main subdomain. Google generally has less trust in subdomains because it’s very easy for people to setup websites such as mysubdomain.blogspot.com. In this case rather than dominating the SERP’s because of blogspot.com’s overall link popularity, Google will value inbound links to this subdomain fully, but the weight of inbound links to the overall domain will have less influence towards rankings.
Keeping all content on the www version of the domain ensures that all inbound link juice is consolidated into a single subdomain, having a greater impact towards strengthening the overall domain. For example, external links to www.seoptimise.com/blog will help to lift rankings on www.seoptimise.com, whereas inbound links to blog.seoptimise.com will benefit the blog subdomain but have less impact to the overall rankings throughout the www version of the website.
There were some negative issues to consider, such as loss of Technorati rankings, change of URL’s for social media bookmarking and a temporary risk of losing rankings, but some reassuring advice from Jane Copland in SEOmoz’s Q&A (link only works for PRO content members) helped to show the decision to use a single www subdomain is clearly the best long-term strategy.
Below we have listed the steps we followed (and recommend) to migrate the WordPress blog to a new subfolder, whilst considering any SEO implications encountered during move:
1) Backup, Move & Restore
Follow these steps to backup the database, install WordPress in the new location and reset the WordPress URL’s to set this up in the new location. Also copy across any additional files such as plugins, themes, uploaded images and updated htaccess for the new permalink structure.
2) URL 301 Redirection
This is to ensure that no broken links or 404 errors are encountered during migration.
The following .htaccess code automatically 301 redirects all old previous subdomain URL’s to the new subfolder structure:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.seoptimise\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
3) Update FeedBurner RSS URL
Make sure your subscribers don’t miss out on your latest posts by reseting the original feed location in FeedBurner.
4) Help Google to quickly index URL changes
Updating your navigational links and XML sitemap should help to ensure Google indexes the new version of the blog as quickly as possible.
5) Remove duplicate content
Ensure that the old URL’s are removed from Google’s index to prevent any duplicate content issues. You can use Google Webmaster Central to remove URL’s but I would highly recommend waiting for the search engines to naturally crawl these pages instead, ensuring that any link juice and ranking history is maintained and redirected to the new version of the page. It may take a while for all of these pages to be removed from Google’s index, so to speed this up why not create a temporary sitemap so that they can follow all of the old indexed links and update it’s cache.
Using a 404 error page will also help you to quickly notice any problems in Google Webmaster Central’s web crawl errors and diagnostics during the migration. For any problems which occur you can setup individual 301 redirects from the broken URL’s to the most relevant webpage on the domain.
And it’s as easy as that!
Everything seems to have gone reasonably smoothly for us so far, hopefully I can report back in a few weeks to show how this has successfully improved our rankings! :D
Update: Google has already indexed 24 new URL’s on http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/ with 610 currently indexed in the old location.
Use the redirection plugin (Urbangiraffe) as it is the easiest way to pick up any errors and handle them quickly.
Thanks Andy, looks very useful
thx a lot, but can someone explain me about 301 rewrite?
Fantastic article here! We actually did our homework on the same issue and came up with some definite benefits going either way. The benefit of the subdomain is the ability to brand the blog as a standalone that people will remember. The negative is that it truly is just like having a separate domain and you need to build up separate link popularity. Its a longer process! (and something we are still waiting for at http://risetothetop.techwyse.com !) Anyway, thanks for the tips… they were very helpful.
Kevin,
I’m curious about your results now that you’re a few months out from this change. We made a recent permalink migration for PPC Hero and are interested in comparing results across some of our contemporaries (for the good or bad…).
Thanks!
Hi John,
The results have been positive, although I think it’s fair to say the improvements to rankings have been more gradual than expected.
For example rankings for “SEO Blog” and individual blog posts have improved but the overall competitive searches for the main website have mainly stayed the same.
I think the main thing is we now know that we are using the best practice and maximising the strength of the whole domain.
Hope everything is going well with the PPC Hero migration.
Kevin
Thanks for the article; putting it in steps really saved me from errors. I wouldn’t have remembered, for example, to update FeedBurner and my XML sitemaps without your guide.
Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the very useful steps, I realise I’ve stumbled into an older post but I’m in a similar situation and am about to make the change. I’d just like to ask you first, how long did it take search engines to have realised the change in all your postlinks (it just seemed like a few hours?)? You will obviously have had many posts indexed by Google for example, how did this migration affect your already indexed posts and their ranking? Will search engines just think all of them as new posts and thus require re-indexing or does sitemap updating prevent this from happen? Sorry for the long list of questions!
very useful steps, i came to know some important points from this. now i am shifting from subdomain to subfolder structure.
Thank You,
Uma.
Thanks for the info! I have my blog at a /blog on my main domain and was wondering about the impact of this. I am about to make a blog for a client and am in the process of debating if I should use a subdomain or subfolder. Since the blog is only going to be used to drive visitors to the main website and improve seo on the main website, your advice has helped me.
Thanks again!
Very nice!
Im wondering, if make a subdomain cause of the good name and redirect to subfolder cause of the good rank and only subdomain name will be published on the net. Would G like that? Thanks!
Thanks Kevin!
Great article. I have been pondering about this for a while. I tried using WP Subdomains plugin not exactly knowing the impact on Google ranking but your article cleared a lot. I am just going to keep categories as sub folders.
Thanks again!
tried 3 differnt htaccess samples till I found yours which actually worked thnks loads