Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 14 years 4 months 9 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

We have a client that has been using OS commerce forever, and we have a good number of links established to the various sections of their e-commerce store. For various reasons, they are looking for a new e-commerce system, and appear to have settled on what I’ll call (for now) Product X.

Several weeks ago, I had a short phone call with product X, and they answered all my questions, and seemed to be able to accomodate our needs. With only a couple of small reservations, I gave it my stamp of approval for the client.

Last week however, my client and I had a phone call together, where she explained a few shortcomings -things that may have been slightly misrepresented in my phone call with the sales department.

Although Product X told me that they COULD host a WordPress blog, apparently they cannot, so they recommended they put their 250+ pages into a subdomain.

My response? But they told me they could! OK, fine, not a deal breaker, and we can just move the blog to a subdomain, and then 301 everything. There may be an initial hit to some of the rankings, but they should bounce back.

Now here’s where it gets really sticky –

This new cart provider claims to only be able to make a maximum of “about a hundred”  URLs into 301 redirects. Huh?!?

Furthermore, if those URLs are not visited EACH and EVERY 30 days, then the redirect ceases to function, and turns into… what? I’m not sure – maybe a 404 error?.  (This would have been a nice feature to include in my old article “How to Make a Crappy Content Management System, wouldn’t it?)

Although that seems incredibly stupid a bit odd, there are several reasons why the client still believes this to be their best choice platforms, and it looks like the decision has already been made.

Since my goal is to retain rankings through this process, my proposed “solution” to the dilemma was to start a new subdomain, then host THAT with the new cart vendor, retaining the main domain on our own host, where we can 301 anything as we see fit.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Plus, as an added benefit, it would also solved the problem of having to move and redirect the blog , and it seems on the surface to be the best of both worlds.

This morning though, I got an email from their marketign manager (who originally hired us) and after sending her my response, I asked permission to use it in a post, and she consented.

Here’s the entire text, including my response, and I hope you’ll weigh in with your thoughts.

Scott,

I found some chatter about subdomains. CV3 said they can set up the web shopping area as a subdomain, but I worry how that will effect those
pages based on what I have read. Based on this, I am leaning towards just moving the whole site and not creating a subdomain.

[name removed]

Next was pasted all of the following text, assumedly taken from a forum somewhere – with my responses added in…

Be careful of all this bad info people are giving you! It does matter….here’s how it works….Google and other Search Engines consider Subdomains entirely new websites….

[Scott says:] Yes, they do consider them “separate” domains, but there’s no harm done ther…

so any subdomain will have a PR of 0.

[Scott says:] Well yes, to begin, but so will ANY new url. Google assigns PR (Page Rank) to a page, and not to a domain, and that’s the purpose of the 301 redirect – it passes the PR.

Subdomains are useful for blogs and such.

[Scott says:] I agree entirely, but I do consider “…and such” to include shopping carts.

1. My website all ready have page rank
2. Now I want create some more section in details. Should I go for sub domain or sub folder? Which one is better?
Creating sections should be done in Folders

[Scott says:] No argument here, and typically, if given a choice, its best to grow your site in themed or silo’d folders

3. My another question is did my present page rank will follow in all my sub domain or I have to promote individually all sub domains and what is
case in case of sub folder ?
Nope….the only way to pass page rank to the subdomain is through a link.

[Scott says:] – a link AND using 301’s for all the old URL’s for all the old links to pass PR

What you thing which is easy to remember sub domain or sub folder from the point of view of visitor?
It all depends on what the site is….but most people only remember main domains…and are confused about subdomains….most people remember
sites with www. at the beginning.

[Scott says:] Tru ‘nuff – but not a big deal to me…

I’d recommend using sub folders. if you have been working on the SEO of your root domain creating back links and all that kinda thing then create a sub domain the effects on your root domain won’t carry over to your sub domain. i unfortunately found this out the hard way

Subdomains over Folders
Subdomains are inexpensive and allow you to target the exact keyword you’re looking for. If I wanted to target the keyword ‘web hosting’, I
could add a sub domain to my site making it web-hosting.monetizers.com. The search engines will see the keyword ‘web hosting’ and factor that
into the SEO Ranking equation – almost as if you owned a domain such as web-hosting.com (this is because the bots see the first part of the url
as the most important section). The negative (and a big one at that) is many SEO experts are using this to spam search engine results.

[Scott says:] Yeah, that was true back in 2007 – Spammers used subdomains a lot will but this is pretty old news and it doesn’t work anymore anyway. The engines are far smarter, and aren’t going to brand you a spammer just for using a subdomain.

It’s speculated that search engines are and will be giving this less weight to reduce the amount of spam in their results.

[Scott says:] – If by “…giving this less weight” they mean subdomains, I disagree and would say that’s not true at all.

Domain names are still important, so it would be better to purchase a domain name such as web-hosting.com (everyone seems to forget about the
-!) rather than create a subdomain.

[Scott says:] A separate domain name is another option, but the subdomain would be on THEIR server at the cart host.

Subdomains do NOT receive any benefit (such as pr) from their parent domain.

[Scott says:] I disagree with that – It’s my belief that a subdomain does get some authority from the main domain with Google, Alexa, or anyone that matters, right out of the gate. If I were building a new business, and had the option of using http://myname.cnn.com or http://myname.com I would happily opt for being a subdomain of CNN, assuming I didn’t have the potential to ever lose the subdomain ownership down the road. In your case, since you own the parent domain, you’re safe.

Also a negative is that subdomains sit on the same IP address, so if one site’s IP gets blacklisted, so do all the rest!

[Scott says:] The subdomain will sit on their server, and with a static IP and SSL certificate there will be no other domains on the IP address.

And last, a subdomain makes it easy to forget that engines see it as a separate site; this means that you may end up placing more then 4 links
between sites and end up penalized for cross linking! A very costly SEO mistake!

[Scott says:] No search engine would be stupid enough to penalize someone for linking to their own shopping car – but – if they did, the negative publicity / buzz it could generate would be awesome 😉 Imagine the links we could get!

Folders over Sub-Domains
Folders are the way to go if you want to leverage the power of your site (PR, Inbound links,etc). Cross linking is not an issue with folders as
they are with subdomains.

[Scott says:] In a typical situation, I agree

New Domain vs Subdomain
Both a new domain and a sub domain start off the same. New domains usually have a different IP address and are given high priority on some
engines (at lease for a couple of weeks). Better to stick with a new domain name.

[Scott says:] But in our case, the subdomain would be hosted at the cart host, so it would be a different IP.

In summary: Stay away from sub domains, folders if you want to leverage your ranking and a new site if you want to really target keywords.

[Scott says:] My summary would be that permanent severe ranking damage could be done to the whole site if it gets entirely moved to their hosting without 100% completion of 301 redirects for every page, and every blog post on the site. If they can make that happen, with actual 301 redirects, then I’d vote to try it. If they can’t though, then I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

There was then a bit more text added –

Smart Traffic SEO Tip #37 – Creating a subdomain or a folder?
Subdomain vs. Subfolder, Subdomain.site.com OR site.com/subfolder
A few key facts regarding subdomains and subfolders.
Subdomains:
* Represented in the URL by the characters after “http://” and the ones before “.site.com”
* Are viewed by Search Engines as totally unique sites independent of the parent domain.
* Site Authority (in other words, the ability for the site and its subsequent pages to rank in the search engines) is not passed down from the parent domain.

Subfolders:
* Represented in the URL by the characters after “.site.com/” and before “filename.html”.
* Are viewed by Search Engines as a subdirectory within a site.
* Site Authority is passed down from the main domain.

Based on the above facts, Subdomains are viewed by search engines as totally unique sites independent of the parent domain and the site
authority is not passed down from the parent domain. This means creating subdomains requires greater quality of content to support its own and in
order for them to rank, it requires a lot of promotion and link building efforts.

Between the two, it is advisable to use Subfolders rather than Subdomains. Use subdomains only when the given topic has extensive
content which requires separate navigation and design. Make sure that the subdomain is of great enough quality that it will acquire links and
stand on its own.

So now, my question to the SEO community is this… What do you think?

Besides finding a different e-commerce platform, (one that can handle hosting WP and performing true 301 redirects) what would you advise?

Relevant factors:

• 1100 pages indexed
• 6500 backlinks in Yahoo
• 200 of the 1100 pages are in the blog

I believe that far less harm will come from moving just the actual products into a new subdomain than the harm that might come from moving everything  – especially given the lack of 301 redirects!

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