dlcmpls Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 Hello all; I have a website now that has 3 major sections. Let's call them "Apples", "Oranges" and "Bananas." Right now I have one domain (let's call it "buygreatfruit.com") and upon arrival at the Home page, users can choose which section of the site they want to visit. For SEO purposes, I'd like to add 3 new domains to the mix. Let's call them: buygreatapples.com buygreatoranges.com buygreatbananas.com So now I would have 4 domains. 1 general domain and 3 specific domains. Is it possible to point my 3 new domains to just the appropriate section of my site without great modifications to the site and osCommerce? For example, if someone visits buygreatapples.com I want them to resolve to the Apples section of my site and ideally only see pages and info about apples. But I'd like to preserve my general domain and keep it in use unaltered and continue the use of just 1 database and 1 backend tool. Hopefully this makes sense. Any advice?
♥mdtaylorlrim Posted June 10, 2010 Posted June 10, 2010 Hello all; I have a website now that has 3 major sections. Let's call them "Apples", "Oranges" and "Bananas." Right now I have one domain (let's call it "buygreatfruit.com") and upon arrival at the Home page, users can choose which section of the site they want to visit. For SEO purposes, I'd like to add 3 new domains to the mix. Let's call them: buygreatapples.com buygreatoranges.com buygreatbananas.com So now I would have 4 domains. 1 general domain and 3 specific domains. Is it possible to point my 3 new domains to just the appropriate section of my site without great modifications to the site and osCommerce? For example, if someone visits buygreatapples.com I want them to resolve to the Apples section of my site and ideally only see pages and info about apples. But I'd like to preserve my general domain and keep it in use unaltered and continue the use of just 1 database and 1 backend tool. Hopefully this makes sense. Any advice? Domains must point to a directory and not a resource. A hack to make it work will be to simply create directories for each to point to, then put a redirect to the correct 'category.' Very crude, but it will work. Another is to simply point the domain to the same root directory as your main site and re-write the url. Keep in mind though, that these methods will lose the alternate domain names in favor of the domain name specified in the configure.php files. I don't know of a way to keep the alternate domain names in the url, unless the multi store add on can be utilized somehow. I'm not familiar with it. Community Bootstrap Edition, Edge Avoid the most asked question. See How to Secure My Site and How do I...?
MrPhil Posted June 10, 2010 Posted June 10, 2010 I would be concerned about Google, et al., dinging you for duplicate content when it comes into the same page(s) by two different routes. You might be able to get around that by using robots.txt to block spiders from indexing in the three specific sections (categories?), when coming in on the main site. I don't know if that would work for sure, or exactly how to do it -- it might take some trial and error. This assumes that you can successfully (and consistently) rewrite URLs coming in on the three specialty domains and have them go to the right place in the general domain. Of course, your indicated domain name in the browser will probably change to the general domain, which somewhat negates the whole point of this exercise. Maybe you could "park" the three specialty domains "over" the general domain (use them as aliases), and in .htaccess rewrite to a specific category. That way, I think you can preserve your specialty domain name, while executing common code and using a common database. Anyway, it might be something to talk to your hosting service about. If you can't park/alias the specialty domains on top of the general domain, another possibility would be "symbolic links" (Linux only) where the specialty domains point into the main store (be careful you don't get into a looping reference!). Then proceed with the standard URL rewrite. In the long run, it might just be cleaner and easier to make 4 completely separate osC installations and databases, and remove the specialty products from the main site. Put three links in each header to let the customer jump to the other three sites (but remember that you'll need to deal with losing the session, and thus the shopping cart). Maybe you can share the database, and the sessions information, across all four stores? I've never tried it, but you might look around for discussions on "multiple stores, one database". Good luck!
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