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Ask HN: I've got a tricky SEO problem.

5 points by unalone ↗ HN
I just finished a personal web site this week. It looks and runs great, but I think I've got an issue with optimization that I don't know how to fix.

I run two blogs, both powered by Tumblr. They appear as subdomains on my site. Now, I want one of these blogs also to function as my front page as well, but I don't want it functioning as my root directory. So right now my front page redirects to the subdomain.

Am I right in thinking that's bad for optimization, both redirecting like that and having my content show up on a subdomain? Is there any way to fix the issue without messing up my site layout? I'm not particularly deft at SEO.

9 comments

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jmount
You can definitely over-think SEO, but the main thing that worries me is re-directs. In my experience the search engines don't like them much and react differently depending on what re-direct code you return (temporary/permanent). I would suggest some capsule or extraction of your sub-domain site as your home page and then linking to your sub-domain. This may not be a complete solution as you now have a landing page and some duplicated content.
unalone
Yeah, that's the issue I'm having. You can see the situation for yourself at http://rinich.com and http://journal.rinich.com. I'm trying to think of what I could put on the home page to make it worth something, but I'm drawing a blank.
brk
I'm not sure that it deeply matters in your case.

For the most part, there is no SEO magic that can override valuable/new/insightful content in the long-run.

Run your blogs as you normally would. People who like them will link to each one respectively. They will get mentions on Twitter. They will get indexed appropriately.

Unless you are in some highly-competitive keyword space it probably won't really matter much in the end.

unalone
My worry is that they're getting indexed twice over.
iamclovin
I'm not sure if I understand the problem correctly but will using canonical URLs help solve the problem? The gist of canonical URLs is that you let google know there might be duplicate content, but the base url to index is your canonical URL. Quite easy to implement as well.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalizatio...

Hope that helps.

sutro
Upvoted for your username.
iamclovin
lol thanks, i'm a big fan of superbad :)
unalone
It certainly does! Thank you.
coffee
dont worry about it - i've had plenty of sites rank just fine in Google with redirects and subdomains, if you do a little digging into Google's webmaster guidelines, they even mention it to some extent (not that everything mentioned in their own doc's are 100% accurate as to what will and will not hurt your rankings)...