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My company has operated a blog site on our primary URL (e.g. www.company.com) for about 4 months. Over this time, we have built up significant SEO ranking through daily posts and articles. Our primary e-commerce product is now developed, and we plan to have the e-commerce site sit at www.company.com.

The e-commerce site is hosted on MediaTemple and our blog site is hosted on BlueHost. We want to ensure we do not lose any of our SEO ranking on www.company.com during the transfer.

What would your ideas be for the best way to make the transfer?

1) Would it be alright to simply move the blog site to www.blog.company.com (still on bluehost)? 2) Should we transfer our blog site to be hosted on mediatemple? 3) Should we move our blog site to www.blog.company.com and get the blog index and compile it into redirection urls for the apache? 4) For readability reasons, we would rather have our blog site at www.company.com/blog. However, I was advised this is more difficult as we would have to configure the proxy.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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4 Answers 4

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I'm not an expert

Making blog.company.com would work. Make sure you have company.com/2011/04/blog-post 301 redirect to blog.company.com/2011/04/blog-post. Ensure all your permanent links 301 redirect to the new site. Ask webmasters linking to your blog to update their links.

Go into Google webmaster tools and setup a change of address. They have steps provided on their site for how to set this up, as well as tips on how to make the process as smooth as possible.

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It is worth mentioning though that as the URLs will change there will indeed be some loss of SEO value of those pages. As while a 301 redirect will pass much of the value a URL has acquired it will not pass all of it. Additionally, moving your blog content to a new subdomain has issues of it's own which are worth considering. Mainly that subdomains are viewed by search engines as totally different sites to the primary domain. So you are essentially splitting the total SEO value of your website by hosting the content at two separate locations.

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    Not true. Subdomains are not seen as new websites. There is no SEO difference between subdomains and subdirectories.
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented May 26, 2011 at 13:05
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1) Would it be alright to simply move the blog site to www.blog.company.com (still on bluehost)?

That would be fine if you do 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. If you do not do 301 redirects you are essentially starting over. The 301 redirect tells search engines, and your users, that those pages have moved and where they have moved to. This is important not only from a usability point of view but it also allows the links and PageRank you've earned to be properly assigned to the new pages. A small amount of value is lost but it's a whole lot better then nothing.

2) Should we transfer our blog site to be hosted on mediatemple?

That's up to you. There is no difference SEO wise between the two. The choice is whether you want to have two hosts or not. I would think one host would be simpler but you know your business better then I do.

3) Should we move our blog site to www.blog.company.com and get the blog index and compile it into redirection urls for the apache?

See my answer to #1

4) For readability reasons, we would rather have our blog site at www.company.com/blog.

There is no difference between subdomains and subdirectories as far as Google is concerned. So if you want to put your blog in a subdirectory go for it.

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You will have no loss in SEO ranking by moving the host of the blog.

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