hillelben
asked on
seo with form 301 or subdomain
we have a store that is running on volusion which is a shopping cart system. the problem is that their search is not very good. we want to make out own search page on a different server. the question is what is the best way to do this seo wise. ie make the search page server a subdomain like seach.mydomain.com or set a 301 redirect for the form, etc
Julian Matz
A subdomain sounds like a good idea. 301 redirects don't always work as you might expect with HTML forms.
ASKER
people told me that google doesn't look at subdomains - that they consider it like a seperate domain. is this true?
Its true. That's how wordpress.com has 5 listings for the phrase
wordpress blog
wordpress blog
You haven't got much choice with Volusion as it is a pretty closed platform where you haven't got enough control to set up a reverse proxy for a folder.
That being said, if this is search results, you don't necessarily have to have the search results indexed and can use possibly iframes, javascript or maybe a dynamic flash embed on the store pages themselves.
I would avoid having the content on a subdomain as Volusion stores tend to already have lots of problems with indexation and duplicate content anyway. Most of that is fixable but I haven't seen a store that did it effectively.
That being said, if this is search results, you don't necessarily have to have the search results indexed and can use possibly iframes, javascript or maybe a dynamic flash embed on the store pages themselves.
I would avoid having the content on a subdomain as Volusion stores tend to already have lots of problems with indexation and duplicate content anyway. Most of that is fixable but I haven't seen a store that did it effectively.
ASKER
google looks at iframes, flash, and ajax? which is best to use? ajax would be problem i guess because it has to get from a different server which i don't think is allowed in ajax
You can block Google from accessing content whichever way you implement it, whether is is just denying all bots, 301 redirecting them somewhere, having URLs which just use "#" fragments they can't navigate, or using robots.txt.
There are all kinds of "search" functions possible with custom sliders for price range selection, visual color based search etc. Which method you use doesn't really matter, it is down to your developers, but in general it is something that doesn't really offer you any benefit being indexed in Google search results.
p.s. pages blocked with robots.txt can accumulate PageRank, but if you have a single externally loaded javascript blocked by robots.txt there shouldn't be a problem.
There are all kinds of "search" functions possible with custom sliders for price range selection, visual color based search etc. Which method you use doesn't really matter, it is down to your developers, but in general it is something that doesn't really offer you any benefit being indexed in Google search results.
p.s. pages blocked with robots.txt can accumulate PageRank, but if you have a single externally loaded javascript blocked by robots.txt there shouldn't be a problem.
ASKER
we want to do the search because the volusion search isn't very accurate. we have 400,000 products and the volusion search searches for the search terms with OR instead of AND which usually doesn't bring up what you want. The thing is now that we're making a separate search how can we do it and still get indexed
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ASKER
thanks for the advice