SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

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!