Multiple Subdomains, my worst seo mistake. now what should i do?
-
Hello Everyone,
I have been running www.designzzz.com from lats 3 years now. and was doing extremely good with a PR 6 and 800K+ traffic monthly, but 6 months ago it started falling and falling badly.. now i am down to 350K total impressions :{ per month.
I have been blaming penguin for this and been talking to google reps continously over it. they assured me that my site is not under any type of manual spam etc.
Then i begin think and i realized taht was exactly the time when i launched a few subdomains as sub parts of my site like coding.designzzz.com , wordpress.designzzz.com , photograph.designzzz.com , shop.designzzz.com in the making...
now is the part that i can't undo these subdomains.. what should i do ?
my search traffic is almost killed.
I seriously need insight on this guys :
thanks in advance!
Ayaz
-
Thank you so much,
ofcourse i will do keep you updated :}
cheers
-
No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hello Devanur,
Thank you so much for the insight and pointing me to the right direction.
i did it like you said. please take a look and tell me if everything is fine.
http://coding.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/coding/
http://wordpress.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/wordpress/ ofcourse with 301s .
same goes for all other subdomains :}
I am curious how much time will it take for my traffic to start getting better?
thanks again
-
Hi Ayaz,
As you say that the sub-domains have their own original content, then please go ahead and put a 301 re-direction to the respective sub-directories on the main domain. Everything should be back to normal as per my personal experience goes. IMO, sub-domains can never be considered sub-directories by any search engine as for Google, sub-domains should be created only when the purpose of their creation is thoroughly justified with much needed diversity like a blog or a forum and/or a topic that deserves branching from that of the main domain's.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.
-
There are certain very specific circumstances where Google treats subdomains as part of the main domain for reporting purposes, Ayaz, but as far as SEO is concerned, subdomains pretty much always have to stand alone as separate sites.
Paul
-
Reverse proxy – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
That should do it for you.
-
Hello,
Thank you so much for the suggestion. as i have wordpress installations in subdomains i am not sure it will be easy to do teh redirect because of paths issues. but yeah i am gona try that.
Some people said that google now treats subdomains as subdirectories so that might not be the issue so i am confused.
About moving content from domain to subdomain , nop not really. subdomains got its own original content.
thanks again.
cheers
-
Rafi has it exactly right - as I would do it. 301 the subdomain to the appropriate page. Then make sure you resubmit a sitemap and ping all of your pages. I think you'll be fine after that. Great post Devanur Rafi.
-
Hey Ayaz,
I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.
The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/
Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.
I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.
By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do subdomains negatively impact SEO
If we want to eliminate one of our domains and consolidate it with our main domain by the subdomain approach, would that negatively impact our SEO? Example: change www.xyz.org to www.xyz.abcd.org, Thanks, in advance, for your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking
Hi there Everyone! I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below: http://www.mefco.co.nz/news http://mefco.co.nz/news any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | jfactor0 -
Mobile SEO for mobile site
Hey there! I own a desktop website and just now finishe building a mobile site ( not a responsive design one) and I wish to start ranking my site on mobile serch result page. due to the automatic redirection from desktop website to the mobile site im confused: where should link to in order to SEO my mobile site? should i link to domin.com and assume the link juice is passing on? or should i link to m.domim.com?
Technical SEO | | logophone0 -
How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?
Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days. After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago. Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Thank you!
Technical SEO | | tact0 -
Multiple Domains for One Site
We are building a site for a new miniature golf course. They have a long name, which they don't want me to mention, but it's equivalent to a name like Golden State Golf and Putt. They also have a restaurant with its own name and brand that will be a part of the mini golf course and its website, much how Hotel websites have their restaurants on their sites. Before becoming our client they purchased golfandputt.com and want to go with this domain for simplicity sake. In addition to this domain name they purchased 7 others that contain the bussiness' full name in some way, such as: goldenstategolfandputt.com goldenstategolfandputt.net, goldenstategolf-guitar.com etc., As well as: 3 variations of the golfandputt.com domain 3 variations of the restaurants name They wish to have all of these redirect to the main website or the restaurant page to "help with SEO," as they told me. From what I have researched on SEOmoz it seems better to simply optimize the website for Golden State Golf and Putt and the restaurant page for the restaurant's name. Additionally, I'm worried that redirecting the domains to the site will actually hurt them in rankings. If someone can shed some light on what the best practices for this sort of situation are I'd be much appreciative. Apologies in advance for the lengthy explanation but its a bit of a unique situation.
Technical SEO | | TVI0 -
SEO Info Bing - Logo and Name
I was reading the "How Search Engines Work" which is chapter 1 of the Beginners Guide to SEO by SEOMOZ. Came across an interesting point: "Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo." Surely most people will alt text their images with keywords or am i missing something here?
Technical SEO | | stefanok0 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0