Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there any benefit in using a subdomain redirected to a single page?
-
For example if we have a domain www.bobshardware.com.au and we setup a subdomain sydneysupplies.bobshardware.com.au and then brisbanescrewdrivers.bobshardware.com.au and used those in ad campaigns. Each subdomain being redirected back to a single page such as bobshardware.com.au/brisbane-screw-drivers etc.
Is there a benefit ?
Cheers
-
Thanks Rick. When you say unless links are involved what do you mean?
-
There will be only a single benefit, which is tracking. Separate subdomains will allow you track visitors properly. No positive or negative result - unless links are involved.
-
Having looked at that white board Friday I did find it helpful.
I did just go look at wotif.com.au and lastminute.com.au one of which I do recall using subdomains to divide their sites with. Neither appear to be using it any more. Which would be another indication that subdomains are in fact bad.
Seems to be subdomains are not really the way to go which from my point of view is a shame. It makes more sense to work that way.
-
Hi David,
Rand covered this very topic in a white board friday. Perhaps you may find it helpful and provide insight on what can happen and why he thinks the way he does.
Hope it helps,
Don
-
The main reasoning behind wishing to use a subdomain is more organisational.
Simply looking at having the subdomain house information on a particular topic or item, for instance screwdrivers in Brisbane. Any deals, latest arrivals etc could be found on that particular subdomain. And further to that thinking being able to redirect to a different page for 2 weeks and then bring the original page back with out changing or adding a new url on which it can be found.
Possibly just me and the way I like things organisationally but the idea appealed and I was wondering if there were any benefits or for that matter negatives to running a particular section that way.
-
Hi David. The benefits associated with 301 redirection come from either relocating your site, combining sites, cleaning up 404 pages, aligning page names within your site architecture, things of that nature. If you have links or visits to those third level pages and want to house all pages on your root domain instead of third levels, then 301 redirection would be the way to go. Cheers!
-
There would not be a direct SEO benefit for doing this. There maybe however a benefit in tracking. If you only used that sub-domain for X ad campaign than you would know all traffic from referral sub-domain would be coming from that ad campaign.
There may be some slight non-optimization for doing it this way. Sub-domains are treated as their own domains to a degree, so you are in affect giving the ad-campaign's link to juice to a new domain entirely. Then forwarding that to a specific page. Opposed to just directly giving the link juice an ad campaign can generate to the actual page.
A couple things here depending on the type of ad campaign there may not be any link juice to worry about, like Google's ad words don't pass link juice. However, if you purchased direct advertisement on certain sites you may get some link juice from those ads running.
The second thing is actually a question. What is the purpose of creating a sub-domain to point to a sub directory? Is it just for tracking? Or were you wondering if you could benefit from a sub-domain being treated as a new domain linking to you? If for tracking; I would think there are other tracking methods that could handle referring traffic. If it were in hopes of gaining a new backlink from a different domain than I would say it isn't helpful this way. First because it is simply forwarding to the sub-directory and secondly even it weren't forwarding the link would be considered from the same server and not very helpful anyway.
So in short, no benefit other than a potential way to help with tracking.
Hope that makes sense and helps,
Don
edit some grammar
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
-
Does the use of a unicode character high up on page adversely affect SEO?
I work for a company in the travel industry and we are currently in the process of building out a 360-degree video landing page to inspire travel to our destination. There is some desire from individuals on my team to use the unicode degree symbol ( ° ) after 360 to ensure clarity. We currently have the ° symbol in the Page Title and H1 tag. Does the use of a unicode character adversely affect SEO? Our concern is that it is very unlikely that people are searching for 360-degree videos using the unicode symbol. We also have it fully written out as well. Just want to make sure we won't get dinged for this. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | smontunnas1 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Speed benefits from loading images from a subdomain
I have read that loading images from a subdomain of your site instead of the main domain will give you speed benefits on load time. Has anyone actually seen that to be the case? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
How to remove the 4XX Client error,Too many links in a single page Warning and Cannonical Notices.
Firstly,I am getting around 12 Errors in the category 4xx Client error. The description says that this is either bad or a broken link.How can I repair this ? Secondly, I am getting lots of warnings related to too many page links of a single page.I want to know how to tackle this ? Finally, I don't understand the basics of Cannonical notices.I have around 12 notices of this kind which I want to remove too. Please help me out in this regard. Thank you beforehand. Amit Ganguly http://aamthoughts.blogspot.com - Sustainable Sphere
Technical SEO | | amit.ganguly0 -
SEO Benefit from Redirecting New Exact Match Domains?
Hi, All! This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer... From David LaFerney: It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query. If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases? In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>> To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit. (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.) But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links? Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword? Or absolutely nothing? (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0