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Seeking Advice on Blog Setup - Advanced

Posted by OneEyedView • 12/14/07 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: blog hosting help, wordpress help

I run several Wordpress blogs on one hosting account. I have the main site, then the other sites in sub directories. The domains I’ve purchased for these sub directory sites are forwarded to the sub directory where they reside, but they are not masked, so as soon as a user visits any page other than the main page, the wind up seeing the full url.

Are there any inherent pros or cons to doing this? Some of my concerns are:

1. User experience (seeing the full domain and having spammy thoughts)

2. Search Engines (will this drive more or less traffic, and are there any potential penalties?)

The reason I do this is to save a buck while I try to make enough to at least pay for the domains and hosting. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

One Eyed View

User Comments

12/14/07

cooper

I wish I could help. I host two blogs on one account but I paid for an add-on slot so it is a totally separate domain and url, always.

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12/14/07

PetLvr

Can you leave some examples?

I used to have a mega site .. (PetLvr.com) and five other sites of mines were domain aliases to petlvr (e.g. PapillonLvr.com was PetLvr.com/papillonlvr etc)

This was the better way for me. But, one of the problems that happened was that all five blogs (actually 6 because one domain alias had two blogs) were sharing the same MySQL database .. and by May 2007 it was too big to backup (around 400MB in size). I ended up segregating when I moved and separated the domains on a new VPS and now dedicated server.

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12/15/07

OneEyedView

Here are some examples:

Main site is internetattendance.com

Here is another donatepennies.org This domain is forwarded to a subdirectory on the http:://internetattendance.com hosting account using a separate WP install and a separate MySQL database.

When you visit the DonatePennies url, you will see the full url of internetattendance.com/donatepennies and any pages you visit there will by like this internetattendance.com/donatepennies/donate-pennies-projects

Now, I do have the option to "mask" the domain too, which would keep the donatepennies.org url across all the pages, and that would definitely not be good SEO.

So, my original two questions stand:
1. User experience (seeing the full domain and having spammy thoughts)

2. Search Engines (will this drive more or less traffic, and are there any potential penalties?)

Any thoughts?

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12/15/07

DaneMorgan

I have many blogs in subdomains with no forwarding domain at all. They experience no ill effects from this.

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12/15/07

OneEyedView

Thanks Dane, that's good to know:)

The reason behind these questions are two fold really. One, because I want to make sure as I build my existing blogs, that I'm not shooting myself in the foot as far as traffic goes, and two, because I have been working on an large scale web project that will be my official step into trying to make a real living online. Before I release it into the wild, I want to be certain that I won't be doing anything to hinder any traffic from natural searches.

I do have a domain already, and am planning to put it in the sudirectory of the same InternetAttendance site.

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12/15/07

PetLvr

I think you are shooting yourself in the foot. You want donatepennies.org/donate-pennies-projects NOT to revert back to
internetattendance.com/donatepennies/donate-pennies-projects because if it does - then it's not a separate domain and could never be pulled out of your internetattendance.com domain.

You want to make a domain alias so that donatepennies.org is the public site even though the real location is internetattendance.com/donatepennies

If your current hosting plan cannot do a domain alias I would create a new account or move them both to a host provider that allows for multiple domains on the single account (Like GLobat.com etc)

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12/15/07

click3

OneEyedView,

I host many blogs & sites on two different Hosting Servers without issues. I agree with Dane, I have lots of sites that use the primary domain name with the subdirectory name w/o problems.

Here's a quick lesson though especially if you have a Hosting Provider that uses cPanel.

If you are using a FTP program to create the subdirectory, that is all you will get is a standard subdirectory with nothing in it. However if you create a subdomain via cPanel, it will install various files used on a site (i.e. cgi-bin, 500.shtml, etc.).

If you own a URL and use the Addon Domain program in cPanel, you will wind up with a subdomain that is accessible two ways: 1. internetattendance.com/subdomain and 2. your www URL (in your case donatepennies.org). Just remember to add the .com or .org to the Addon domain name (ie. name it donatepennies.org) when creating the subdomain.

Now when you use donatepennies.org your domain name will display without your primary host domain preceding it. Less work and no need for forwarding or masking.

--Craiger

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12/15/07

OneEyedView

PetLvr and Craiger,

Thanks a lot for "kickin' the knowledge"! Turns out that my hosting account is Deluxe Hosting through Godaddy and they do offer domain aliasing. I'm in the process of changing things around...removing forwarding and adding the subdomain aliasing. I'm waiting for it all to propagate to see if things worked correctly.

As an aside, I am testing this with a different domain from what I listed above, this is howtoeatcheap.com

Feel free to check it out and view the directory paths, etc.

I will keep you all posted!

p.s. I don't use cPanel or any of Godaddy's install options. I do everything I can manually through FTP.

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