SEO - question - subfolder instead of subdirectory

[Pav1977]

Hi there all,

We have a site

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/

which has a subsection

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/

this subsection is a feed containing links to subdomain

http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/

- this subdomain is hosted on a separate CMS.
So in effect there are 2 separate CMSs involved for the same site.
This has the SEO disadvantage where the ‘Google juice’ is spread between the subdomain and the domain. So the hits to subdomain don’t benefit the main domain. This is the problem I was faced with fixing.
The question is how do I make 2 separate CMSs appear under the same domain? So instead of using

http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/

we would only use

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion

and the articles listed there would link to

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/exampleArticle1

instead of

http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/exampleArticle1

The reason behind doing it this way was that the main CMS wasn’t capable of handling a decent blog so the builders of this site decided to place it on wordpress and make the look and feel the same so it looks like the same site.

Any suggestions, links to related articles on the subject will be much appreciated.

Cheers

 

[kjv1611]

For directing where people go by clicking on various links, you may can use .htaccess file settings, assuming the whole thing is running on php. I could be wrong, though, it might be running on something totally different.

The section you'll probably want to mess with is the .htacess rewrites section.

Here's actually one link that helped me a bunch in some .htaccess dealings I ran into recently:

http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

Here's an additional link:

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/mod_rewrite-tips-and-tricks.html

And I'd definitely suggest trying to find one CMS that fit the whole bill of handling everything instead of keeping things separate - if possible, of course for SEO issues like you mentioned as well as searching and filtering of data. It just seems the whole thing would be better using one main database, and one overall controlling package/piece of software.

I'd suggest Drupal, myself, but I'm not about to suggest a complete redesign of the site.

 

[Pav1977]

OK my mistake I forgot to say that I'm on IIS

Yes we are moving over to Drupal but this is a long term project and we need some fix for now.

 

[kjv1611]

Sorry. Well, if you want to try to use .htaccess type methods, then perhaps this site will be of some assistance:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/557/translate-htaccess-content-to-iis-webconfig/

I found it here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=.hta...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

 

[ChrisHunt]

You might be better off discussing this in forum828 . I'm far from convinced that your current configuration is doing you any harm at all. The only problem you'd have is if you had a given opinion article appearing under two different URLs - eg. publicfinance.com/opinion/somearticle and oinion.publicfinance.com/somearticle , because any incoming links would be split betwen the two. That doesn't appear to be the case on your set-up.

Dunno much about IIS (there's probably a forum for it on here too), but I assume they must have an equivalent to mod_rewrite. Using it, you could design your URLs the way you want them, whilst leaving things behind the scenes just the way there are.

Alternatively, change your Wordpress setup so it actually is sitting in the /opinion/ subdirectory of your main site (you'll probably have to tweak your main CMS to get this to work), and 301 redirect any references to the subdomain to the new URLs.

But I'd leave it just how it is.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd