Blog - FOLDER or SUB-DIRECTORY?

[ashults74]

I just hired a content writer to blog on my site, but I want to make sure I have the right blog set up properly before doing so.

I currently have my blog on my own domain the 3dcart (the blog.asp one). I'm not at all pleased with the blog, to be quite frank. It doesn't allow me to change category titles so it's throwing duplicate content in WMT - not good.

I am seriously considering getting a self hosted Wordpress blog and linking that to my site instead - so it will be blog.domainname.com or domainname/blog

My CONCERN.... I always heard that it's best to have the blog right right on the eCommerce site (just as I have it now) because it keeps feeding the domain fresh content. If I have a self hosted Wordpress blog and have it linked to my site, will it still feed my site fresh content? If so... what is the better choice for this blog.domainname.com (subdomain blog) or domainname/blog (folder blog).

AND is it even possible on 3dcart to put it in a folder?

[cbsteven]

This has been discussed many times in various threads. There is no consensus on whether or not having a blog on a separate domain will damage your SEO or not, but recent articles seem to suggest that it will not. It is not possible to have 3DCart put a wordpress blog in a subfolder, though, so that isn't even an option.

[Shopguy]

Based on what I've read you can't host anything other than the 3dCart blog as a sub directory(www.yourdomain.com/blog). If you want to use a different blog system you have to use a subdomain (blog.yourdomain.com)Read this thread:
http://forums.3dcart.com/chit-chat/4...g-another.html

About every other week I search google, again, to see if it's really that bad to move to a subdomain. Every time everything I find says to use a sub directory. So I stay with the 3dCart blog system.

On a different note does anyone know if it's possible to upload blog content rather than using the admin panel?

[cbsteven]

On a different note does anyone know if it's possible to upload blog content rather than using the admin panel?

Not directly, although you could do it with the Advanced API and insert the article directly into your store database. Not for the faint of heart.

[ashults74]

Aren't you getting duplicate content for your title pages in Webmaster Tools by using the 3dcart blog? That is my main concern.

[cbsteven]

Aren't you getting duplicate content for your title pages in Webmaster Tools by using the 3dcart blog? That is my main concern.

Can you explain exactly what you mean? I don't see anything regarding duplicate content in WMT and I don't understand why people are saying that the built in blog causes the error.

[ashults74]

I only made 2 posts and I have these errors. These will be building up. The only titles that can be changed are the actual blog post titles.
Blog - mydomain
/General-Information_bc_4.html
/News-Announcements_bc_1.html
/Sales-Specials_bc_3.html
/blog.asp
/blog_archive_6_2012.html
/blog_archive_7_2012.html

In WMT, go to OPTIMIZATION/HTML IMPROVEMENTS. That is where you'll see if you have duplicate content.

[cbsteven]

Ah. I guess I am not too worried about that. The nature of my catalog is that there will be a lot of duplicate content anyway, and blogging is a secondary thing for me.

[ashults74]

You should always worry about duplicate content, especially with the new Panda algorithm.

[Shopguy]

I see the same thing. 'Pages with duplicate title tags'

For me these are all categories(and only ones that have articles). I did have an issue with this early on where I wasn't putting a title on each blog post. You have to click the SEO button at the top for the field to appear. I went back and added titles to everything and that cleared up most of it.

Now as far as adding titles to the categories and archives. I'm an amateur so bear with me. It looks like the same blog.html template is being used to display categories as well as the archives. The title is being declared in the frame template. The variable [title] is what is being displayed by the frame.html template.

All of the categories populate the [title] variable with the same text. The 'page title' in the blog article is used for the [title] when viewing a single article. I don't see any kind of option to supply a unique title for categories or archives.

So it looks like the duplicate title tags can be limited to the categories and archives at least. Anyone know of a way to control the title of those?

[Brtp4]

Lots of dupe penalties in WMT for me. Having them (and especially ignoring them) is contrary to having a blog.

The software creates errors from the blog, product map, pagination, etc. Having an ecommerce platform that makes the fundamental error of creating dozens of warnings and errors in WMT is nuts.

BP

[jimmy3dcart]

I only made 2 posts and I have these errors. These will be building up. The only titles that can be changed are the actual blog post titles.
Blog - mydomain
/General-Information_bc_4.html
/News-Announcements_bc_1.html
/Sales-Specials_bc_3.html
/blog.asp
/blog_archive_6_2012.html
/blog_archive_7_2012.html

In WMT, go to OPTIMIZATION/HTML IMPROVEMENTS. That is where you'll see if you have duplicate content.

Thanks for reporting these issues and emailing me directly about it. The changes to both the blog categories and archive pages will be deployed with the next update. It'll be great if you can provide feedback regarding the DUPLICATE TITLES messages in your google webmaster tools accounts after the changes.

Jimmy