What is mirroring a site?

What are the SEO effects of intermix of WP blog, custom PHP site and FB app game?

• We're a melbourne tech company in the process of building a custom site in PHP. We plan to launch a "pre-launch" page which is also custom coded (CSS3 on twitter bootstrap framework + HTML5 front end and PHP back end). On that site will be a link to a blog - the idea behind this is to build up ranking for a variety of relevant keywords prior to the full site going live (given the majority of the site is a member only community anyway so the blog is really the main way we'll be able to execute on-site SEO. Ideally, we would like to install wordpress in a subdirectory on our servers and just customise the header to look the same as the landing page of the website. But some questions and concerns... Is there any detrimental effect on SEO efforts in having two separate systems (one custom PHP, the other an installation of wordpress) to manage the blog vs the rest of the site? Are there any benefits or detriments to installing on a sub domain such as blog.sitename.com vs. sitename.com/blog. My preference would be sitename.com/blog as it feels neater - but open to suggestions based on knowledge of Google preferences. Separately, we are building a Facebook app which is under another site name. Again because we are launching this app first, from an SEO perspective, would it actually be better to run it from a sub domain on the main site - e.g. gamename.mainsitename.com instead of on app.gamename.com? Currently we have it on app.gamename.com, but if there are SEO benefits to moving it to the other domain and server then we'll do it. Basically we don't want to have our SEO efforts divided - will Google algorithms prefer two sites heavily referring traffic, or is it better to focus our efforts on one. I guess that's the crux of the issue. But the other one is - does Google care about traffic accessing a page built for the Facebook app iFrame - does that count toward rankings?  Because if not, it's not worth the trouble of shifting the app to a new server. Sorry I hope these questions aren't too complex - but we're in the tech world every day and still can't seem to find a good answer to these ones...hence I'm taking to the forums!! Free beer for whoever can give me a solid answer!

• Answer:

  1. No there is no negative effect in having a custom PHP for the main website and Wordpress for the blog. Imagine ecommerce websites. They have custom CMS for the main website but most of them choose Wordpress for the blog. For example http://ebay.com is using J2EE but their blog blog.ebay.com is using Wordpress. 2. Go with your preference that's a subfolder :) Sub domains will be treated like a separate website. So the authority generated for blog.sitename.com will not be passed to the sitename.com and also the authority of sitename.com cannot be passed to the subdomain. Subfolders are preferred because it exists with the main domain and any authority built for the blog will be passed to the main website and vice versa. Refer these posts http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/09/international-seo-strategy-domains-subdomains-or-subfolders.html 3) I wouldn't bother about the Facebook app. Since it will be loaded as an iFrame in Facebook and I hope you need the person to login to their FB account to use the app. So Googlebot wouldn't be able to crawl it because it doesn't have an FB account. But I will host all the information of the app under mainsitename.com since that app info page will get links from tech blogs and other related sites once it is released and I would love to pass that authority to the main site. Yes, It is better to focus on a single domain. Website traffic may be a ranking factor. Google might use the bounce rate as a quality signal. Also websites with more direct traffic means those sites are popular among the users and might help in better rankings. For a Facebook app in an iFrame these doesn't matter. Now get me a beer :)