Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
-
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing
The situation is as follow:
For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them.
Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.comSo I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are:
- no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages)
- duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client)
- impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console.
- Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google.
Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of?
The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected.
So my questions basically are:
1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed? -
Yes, I'm ware on that one and as we speek it's getting fixed. But I'm curious on x amount of irrelevant subdomains on rankings
-
Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them.
Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of?
The issues that you are thinking about here are only issues that might impact example.com.
You need to think about issues that impact your clients. Your clients' domains should have the only copy of their content being indexed by Google. Allowing their content to be indexed could cause problems for the client. The duplicate copy could cause pages on their domain to go into the supplemental index. The duplicate copy could also cause some of their traffic to go to your site.
I would not use a hosting service that allows it.
So my questions basically are:
1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
Just stop this practice of publishing client backups. Find another backup method. The impact that you should be worrying about is clients who are aware of this problem finding out about it and complaining loudly.
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
-
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
International SEO and Website Redirection
Hey there Mozzers, If you have a website for example www.example.com and you wanted to target Australia and UK and you owned the .com.au and .co.uk. Would that be ok if everything redirected to the .com ? I know that having the .com.au is a signal for Google but the redirection is causing me troubles. Would that be huge of a difference if everything redirected to the .com version of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
SEO issues with Magento
Hi Everyone, We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking. Issue #1: Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked. 12/05/12 : ranked 12th 1/09/13: ranked 19th 1/16/13: ranked 35th Now: out of top 50 (52nd) Issue #2: Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why... Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this. Site: www.scojo.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t_parrish0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Frames and SEO
In the old days frames were a problem because they could end up being orphaned pages that get indexed and appear in the SERPS but had to navigation so they were useless. Are frames still a problem with Google and if so what are the suggested solutions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?
Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon, thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos0 -
Adwords Policy and SEO
I have a customer who runs campaigns on adwords and we have had real problems with his ads being taken down due to certain ingredients being present in supplements. Now we move towards his SEO campaign and we wondered if the natural listings are effected by sites that list banned substances or pages listed on the adwords policy as being banned ? Has anyone experienced a site being downgraded by link being present from sites that provided products or services that are banned from being advertised on Google adwords ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0