Thread: Multi-Store SEO

Has anyone run into seo problems with regards to SEO among different sites using the same cart platform?

I'm moving an existing site, with established SEO practices and organic traffic I'd like to retain and build upon. We've gone through the trouble of cloning each product we will offer in the sub-domain, so that each element will be unique content: meta title & description, all content on product description, summary, reviews, images, etc. The objective is the appearance of a separate site, that is completely unique.

I can't seem to create a virtual directory or any means to separate some key files, so they appear as root files under the secondary domain url. IE a robots.txt file that is separate from our main domain root file.

My concerns around SEO are how the search engines view the relationship between domains sharing the same host, files, etc.

Curious how other users are addressing this.

Jeff

If it was me I would set up both sites as their own website in IIS and send them to different file structures. For example website1.com would go to C:\web1 and website2.com would go to C:\web2. You would just copy the files between the two sites so that they use the same main files, but you can still change the robots.txt file or other files separately. Since all of the information about each store is stored in the database, even though they are different file structures both sites should still work if you point them to the same database.

The only issue that this would create is that you wouldn't be able to control website2's images on website1's admin panel.

- Ryan

Thanks Ryan. I agree - we are hosted by Vortx (ASPDTSF) and for whatever reason, they can't set up a simple file structure like that.

I was able to create a site (XML) with a different name for our first subdomain and submitted that to Google. That part is working OK so far, but I still don't have an answer for where to place a robots file or any other files related to the domain.

O ok. Well you could add a rewrite rule to the web.config file for "/robots.txt" and rewrite it to a different "robots.txt" file depending on what host name (website1.com or website2.com) is being requested. For example you could add the folder "robots" to your root directory. Then inside that robots folder add another folder and name it the same as the host name (website1.com). Inside that folder create a "robots.txt" file that you want to use for that host name. Then add the following rewrite rule to the web.config file in the root directory:

<rule name="Robots File" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="robots\.txt" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="/robots/{HTTP_HOST}/{R:0}" />
</rule>

This will make it so that IIS serves up a different "robots.txt" file for each host name. Also this will work the same way for the sitemap.xml file or any other file that you want changed depending on which website is visited. After you create the "sitemap.xml" file in each of the host name folders (/robots/website1.com/sitemap.xml) you just have to change the rewrite rule a little bit by adding the sitemap.xml file to the url attribute of the <match> tag. So <match url="robots\.txt" /> becomes <match url="robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml" />.

- Ryan