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.
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
-
Good morning,
This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below:
Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP.
Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall.
Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index.
Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again?
Thank you for your time,
Chase
-
Hi Chase,
Removing dev via web master tools should do the trick for now. Then since google won't get to dev anymore you should be safe.
Adding both noindex and password protection is not needed. Since it's password protected Google won't get to see the noindex on the pages. So you should only do one of the two. No need to change now. The password protection is safe.
As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP. Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'. That's not possible, right?
*** Yes, that's not possible so you are good.
Only 301 redirections are "mandatory" for Google to pass equity - so all good.
-
No worries, that's what this community is here for!
Google views subdomains as different entities. They have different authority metrics and therefore different ranking power. Removing a URL on a subdomain won't have any affect on it's brother over on a different subdomain (for example: dev. and www.).
Good call to keep the disallow: / on the dev.chiplab.com/robots.txt file - I forgot to mention that you should leave it there, for anti-crawling purpose.
This is the query you'll want to keep an eye on. The info: operator is new and can be used to show you what Google has indexed as your 'canonical' homepage.
-
Hi Logan,
Last follow-up. I swear.
Since I'm pretty new to this I got scared and cancelled the 'dev.chiplab.com' link removal request. I did this because I didn't want to go up 14 days without any traffic (this is the estimated time I found that the Google SERP can take to be updated even though we "fetched as GoogleBot in GWT). May be wrong on the SERP update time?
So what I did was add a 301 permanent redirect from 'dev.chiplab.com' to 'www.chiplab.com'. I've kept the NOFOLLOW/NOINDEX header on all 'dev' subdomains of course. I've kept the DISALLOW in robots.txt for the dev.chiplab.com site specifically. So now I just plan on doing work in the 'dev' site (because I can't test anything with the redirects happening). And then hopefull in 14 days or so the domain name will change gracefully in the Google SERP from dev.chiplab.com to www.chiplab.com. I did all of this because of how many sales we would lose if it took 14 days to start ranking again for this term. Good?
Best,
Chase
-
You should be all set# I wouldn't worry about link equity, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on your domain authority over the next few days.
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for fast reply!
We did the following:
- Added NOINDEX on the entire subdomain
- Temporarily removed 'dev.chiplab.com' using Google Webmaster Tools
- Password protected 'dev.chiplab.com'
As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP. Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'. That's not possible, right? Do we now just wait until GoogleBot crawls 'www.chiplab.com' and hope that it is restored to #1?
Thank you for your time (+Shawn, +Matt, +eyqpaq),
Chase
-
noindex would be the easiest way.
Seen some people having the same issue fixing it by adding rel canonical to dev pointing to the new site and so the main site got back step by step with no interruptions...
Cheers.
-
Just like Chase said, noindex your dev site to let the search engines know that it should not show in search. I do this on my dev sites everytime.
-
The most ideal method would be to make the dev page password protected. What I would do is to 301 redirect the dev page to the subsequent correct site pages and then when the SERP refreshes, I'd make the dev site a password protected site.
-
Hi Chase,
Removing the subdomain within Search Console (WMT) will not remove the rest of your WWW URLs. Since you have different properties in Search Console for each, they are treated separately. That removal is only temporary though.
The most sure-fire way to ensure you don't get dev. URLs indexed is to put a NOINDEX tag on that entire subdomain. NOFOLLOW simply means that links on whatever page that tag is on won't be followed by bots.
Remember, crawling and indexing are different things. For example, if on your live www. site you had an absolute link somewhere in the mix that had dev.chiplab.com in it, since you presumably haven't nofollowed your live site, a bot will still access that page. The same situation goes for a robots.txt disallow. That only prevents crawling, not indexing. In theory, a bot can get to a disallowed URL and still index it. See this query for an example.
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
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
Merging two different domains - subdomain or subfolder?
My company has two sites on different domains. We are considering merging the sites into one and keeping only the dominant domain. The dominate site is already a sub-domain of a larger organization so the new sub-domain would be two levels deep. I realize this is a little abstract so below is an example Dominant company site: company.root-domain.com Secondary company site: other-root-domain.com When they merge, everything will be on company.root-domain.com. Should it be other.company.root-domain.com or company.root-domain.com/other Note: The other site has several hundred pages. Both sites have strong authority and link profiles. I want to maintain as much of the value on the other site as possible with the merge.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEI0 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Turning off a subdomain
Hi! I'm currently working with http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/. They have a previous version of the site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com, as sub domain on their site. I've noticed a whole bunch of indexing issues which I think are caused by this. The v1 site has several thousand pages and ranks organically for a number of terms, but the pages are not relevant for the business at this time. The main site has just over 100 pages. More than 28,400 urls are currently indexed. We are considering turning off the v1 site and noindexing it. There are no real backlinks to it. The only worry is that by removing it, it will be seen as a massive drop in content. Rankings for the main site are currently quite poor, despite good content, a decent link profile and high domain authority. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0