Is it possible to redirect the main www. domain - but keep a subdomain active?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer...
Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com.
Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com. I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc.
Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist.
If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority? On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active.
Make sense? Any answers?
Thanks everyone...
-
Hi - thank you for your responses and sorry for my very late reply.
Appreciate your input on this. Ruth, the reason for this being in a consideration was because the company wanted to re-brand their customer-facing site (changing to newwebsite.com) but keep oldwebsite.com as a corporate site.
The issue of course is that, unless we did a complete domain transfer, we would lose some of the fantastic rankings that have been built up over two years of hard work. This got me thinking about whether I could give them both, i.e. create subdomain.oldwebsite.com even though the main site has been redirected and transferred.
Having thought about that, I wanted to know if anyone had tested this as it seemed like a potential loop-hole, whereby you might be able to have subdomain.oldwebsite.com and newwebsite.com both piggy-backing off the same DA. But, as you mentioned that DA doesn't transfer that well to subdomains, I guess this may be one reason why.
Thankfully, this strange scenario was avoided, as I finally managed to convince them to start a new corporate site on a .net or .org. The corporate site doesn't need to rank particularly, so I got my #1 solution anyway. The subdomain idea I posted above was a potential backup plan at best, as the CEO didn't look like budging for a while!
Thanks again - much appreciated! Incidentally, I have another question posted here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-not-indexing-xml-sitemap-images. It's really killing me, so I hope somebody can offer some assistance!
Cheers,
Mark
-
DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.
It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.
You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.
-
I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.
An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.
I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.
Just my thoughts.
-
Thanks for your response, Allen - much appreciated.
I probably wasn't clear in my original message that I am specifically interested in what happens to Domain Authority in that scenario - and wondered if anyone had tested this. Hence felt a web dev / IT forum would be the wrong place.
So I thought it might be possible to do this technically, for the reasons you mentioned. But what happens to the DA?
Let's say you redirect www.example.com to www.newsite.com. www.newsite.com then takes over from www.example.com in the rankings (done this several times and it's been near seamless).
But, I then want to set up a subdomain on example.com AFTER I have redirected www.example.com. Surely, that subdomain would retain some of that DA and thus have an unfair advantage. All of a sudden, I could engineer it so that subdomain.example.com AND www.newsite.com rank alongside each other.
Not tried this before so fascinated to see if the subdomain would rank - or whether because it's on a redirected site, it would not.
Cheers!
-
Hey guys,
Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.
What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com
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
-
Moving pages to new domain
Hello, Our product pages are ranked #1 on google for our target keywords using our domain e.g. www.olddomain.com/cases/productxyz and sell about 20 products all ranked #1. We have a new company called www.newco.com/case/product1, 2, 3 etc. We use woocommerce e-commerce for both old and new sites. What is the best way to list our old co-products on our new site and move over the #1 rankings? Do we create new products (using our new nice design) in the newco.com woo commerce and then redirect old co links? do we copy and paste all that old content into the newco.com? Totally confused. Thank you!
Web Design | | Jamesmcd031 -
Spanish website indexed in English, redirect to spanish or english version if i do a new website design?
Hi MOZ users, i have this problem. We have a website in Spanish Language but Google crawls it on English (it is not important the reasons). We re made the entire website and now we are planning the move. The new website will have different language versions, english, spanish and portuguese. Somebody tells me that we have to redirect the old urls (crawled on english) to the new english versions, not to the spanish (the real language of the firsts). Example: URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language English version. the other option will be redirect to the spanish new version, which the visitor is waiting to find. URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language Spanish version. What do you think? Which is the better option?
Web Design | | NachoRetta0 -
Domain Authority Drop After Website Relaunch
Prior to my website redesign and relaunch on July 10th, our domain authority was 33. 301 redirects were implemented properly. Out or 600 pages, about 200 URLs were modified. Domain authority has dropped to 28. Rankings are terrible. Conversions are awful. What does the domain authority drop mean? I have noticed in the past that a drop in domain authority tends to coincide with more a drop in ranking and a drop in the quality of visitors. The site is www.metro-manhattan.com Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
Having your blog on an external domain, is this ok?
We have our website / ecomm cart with network solutions and they do not allow you to have a internal blog like www.islesurfboards.com/blog . So the only solution is to have the blog on a external domain www.islesurfboardsblog.com which we set up. Is this ok for seo purposes or are we gonna miss out on alot by doing this. Any help?
Web Design | | isle_surf0 -
Redirects (301/302) versus errors (404)
I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases 1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking. b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404 2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.
Web Design | | proptiger0 -
Geo Targeting for a City / State - is it possible?
What are the best ways to geo-target for a specific city? (Please share your top 5 ways to do so)
Web Design | | HMCOE0 -
Changing a domain for local.
I have a client that currently is using a sub-domain site from our local news paper site. The domain authority looks huge, but it is not really their own domain. I know in the log run it best to change the domain name. I am afraid of a significant drop in Google Places traffic when I change to a new domain. Has anyone dealt with type of situation?
Web Design | | Joshen0