Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
-
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com.
Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+.
I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following:
1. Are they passing bad link juice?
2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain?
3. The best approach to having these links removed?
-
Kyle,
Appreciate the response and your insight. The subdomain was set to 301, which made me nervous about the bad links. However, there has been no warning in GWMT. I am curious where the threshold lies for GWMT to flag your link profile. And if a poor link profile can affect your site's authority before you cross that line in GWMT.
I highly doubt a straight answer exists for that question, but I'd be curious to here yours (and others) experiences with the matter.
Thanks again!
-
1. Are they passing bad link juice?
Yes, if you 301 redirected a website/page you bring over both the good and the bad link equity with it.2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain?
Refer to question 13. The best approach to having these links removed?
Have you received a unnatural links warning in GWT yet? If not you maybe safe with waiting it out. If you are trying to cut it off before that happens i would start with running a LinkDetox report (only $50 and totally worth it). They will define the toxic links, from there i would disavow them.Hope this helps!
- Kyle
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
-
Can bad html code hurt your website from ranking ?
Hello,For example if I search for “ Bike Tours in France” I am looking for a page with a list of tours in France.Does it mean that if my html doesn’t have list * in the code but only that apparently doesn’t have any semantic meaning for a search engine my page won’t rank because of that ?Example on this page : https://bit.ly/2C6hGUn According to W3schools: "A semantic element clearly describes its meaning to both the browser and the developer. Examples of non-semantic elements: <div> and - Tells nothing about its content. Examples of semanticelements: <form>, , and- Clearly defines its content."Has anyone any experience with something similar ?Thank you, </form>
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
What should the combined domain rank of 2 sites?
We have just combined 2 sites by redirecting a site with a domain ranking of 35 to a site with a domain ranking of 27 (this is because the we want to use the address with a ranking of 27) After a week I now have 1 domain with a ranking of 26?? So my questions are; Should the ranking have increased already? What should I expect the ranking to increase to if at all? Is there something I could have done wrong when transferring? Thanks
Technical SEO | | benj450 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tjhossy0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Root domain ranks higher than sub pages
Our website is over 10 years old and has been very successful with google. We rank highly for our keywords, but recently a strange thing has happend. Google has indexed a video from our front page (which no longer exists) and shows this listing instead of the sub pages. This means the listing is irrelevant to the search term. Term is "Junior Cricket Bats"
Technical SEO | | NickKer
https://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GBGB377GB377&q=junior+cricket+bats should some up with this page
http://www.cricketsupplies.com/junior-cricket-bats.asp but shows the root domain
http://www.cricketsupplies.com/ with this video link which does not exist We should be ranking really well , and were , but now not so good , even though SEOmoz loves our pages if anybody can see anything obvious i would be thanksful. regards0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
How much authority does a 301 pass to a different domain?
Hi, A client of mine is selling his business to a brand new company. The brand new company will be using a brand new domain (no way to avoid that unfortunately) and the current domain (which has tons of authority, links, shares, tweets, etc.) will not be used. Added to that, the new company will be taking over all the current content with just a few minor changes. (I know, I wish we could use the old domain but we can't.) Obviously, I am redirecting all pages on the current domain to the new domain via 301 redirects on a page by page basis. So, current.com/product-page-x.html redirects to new.com/product-page-x.html. My client and the new company both are asking me how much link juice (and other factors) are passed along to the new domain from the old domain. All I can find is "not the full value" or variants thereof.My experience with 301 redirects in the past has been within a single domain and I've seen some of those pages have decent authority and decent rankings as a result of the 301 (no other optimization work was done or links were added). Are there any studies out there that I'm missing that show how much authority/juice gets passed and/or lost via a 301 redirect? Anybody with a similar issue see any trends in page/domain authority and/or rankings? Thanks for any insights and opinions you have.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0