Product Subdomain Outranking "Marketing" Domains
-
Hello, Moz community!
I have been puzzling about what to do for a client. Here is the challenge.
The client's "product"/welcome page lives at
this page allows the visitor to select the country/informational site they want OR to login to their subdomain/install of the product.
Google is choosing this www.client.com url as the main result for client brand searches.
In a perfect world, for searchers in the US, we would get served the client's US version of the information/marketing site which lives at https://client.com/us, and so on for other country level content (also living in a directory for that country)
It's a brand new client, we've done geo-targeting within the search console, and I'm kind of scared to rock the boat by de-indexing this www.client.com welcome screen.
Any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions are so appreciated.
THANKS!
Thank you!
-
thanks! Such a great answer.
-
You are very right to be worried about rocking that particular boat. If you de-index a page, it basically nullifies its SEO authority. Since the page which you would nullify, is a homepage-level URL (you gave the example 'www.client.com') then this would basically be SEOicide
Most other pages on your site, probably get most of their SEO authority and ranking power from your homepage (directly or indirectly, e.g: homepage linking to sub-page vs homepage linking to category, which then links to sub-page)
This is because, it's almost certain that your homepage will be the URL which has gained the most links from across the web. People are lazy, they just pick the shortest URL when linking. I'm not saying you don't have good deeplinks, just that 'most' of the good ones are probably hitting the homepage
So if you nullify the homepage's right to hold SEO authority, what happens to everything underneath the homepage? Are you imagining an avalanche right now? That's right, this would be one of the worst possible ideas in the universe. Write it down, print it out and burn it
Search-console level geo-targeting is for whole sites, not pages or (usually, though there can be exceptions) sections - you know that right? What that does is tell Google which country you want the website (the whole property which you have selected) to rank in. It basically stops that property from ranking well globally and gives minor boosts in the location which has been selected. If you just took your homepage level property and told it that it's US now, prepare to kiss most of your other traffic goodbye (hard lesson). If you were semi-smart and added /US/ as a separate property, and only set the geo targeting to US for that property - breathe a sigh of relief. It likely won't solve your issue but it won't be a complete catastrophe either (phew!)
Really the only decent tool you have to direct Google to rank individual web pages for regions and / or languages is the hreflang tag. These tags tell Google: "hey, you landed on me and I'm a valid page. But if you want to see versions of me in other languages - go to these other URLs through my hreflang links". Hreflangs only work if they are mutually agreed (both pages contain mirrored hreflangs to each other, and both pages do NOT give multiple URLs for a single language / location combination - or language / location in isolation)
The problem is, even if you do everything right - Google really has to believe "yes, this other page is another version of exactly the same page I'm looking at right now". Google can do stuff like, take the main content of both URLs, put it into a single string, then check the Boolean string similarity of both content strings to find the 'percentage' of the content's similarity. Well, this is how I check content similarity - Google does something similar, but probably infinitely more elegant and clever. In the case of hreflangs string translation is probably also enacted
If Google's mechanical mind, thinks that the pages are very different - then it will simply ignore the hreflang (just like Google will not pass SEO authority through a 301 redirect, if the contents of the old and new page are highly dissimilar in machine terms)
This is a fail-safe that Google has, to stop people from moving high rankings on 'useful' or 'proven' (via hyperlinks) URLs (content) - onto less useful, or less proven pages (which by Google's logic, if the content is very different, should have to re-prove their worth). Remember, what a human thinks is similar is irrelevant here. You need to focus on what a machine would find similar (can be VERY different things there)
So even if you do it all properly and use hreflangs, since the nature of the pages is very different (one is functional, helps users navigate, log-in and download something - that's very useful; whilst the other is selly, marketing content is usually thin) - it's unlikely that Google will swallow your intended URL serves
You'd be better off making the homepage include some marketing elements and making the marketing URLs include some of the functional elements. If both pages do both things well and are essentially the same, then hreflangs might actually start to work
If you want to keep the marketing URLs pure sell, fine - but they will only be useful as paid traffic landing pages (like from Google Ads, Pinterest Ads or FaceBook ads) where you can connect your ad to the advertorial (marketing) URLs. People expect ads to land on marketing-centric pages. People don't expect (or necessarily want) that for just regular web searches. The channel (SEO) is called 'organic' for a reason!
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
-
Forwarding kw rich domains to main domain
Hi My client has a clutch of kw rich domains that want to point to main domain, apart from being good for promotional reasons is there any seo benefit for doing so (i know there used to be years ago but under impression hasn't been any benefit for a long while) Most importantly though can any bad come from doing this ? Best Rgds Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Webmaster Tools "Links to your site" history over time?
Is there a way to see a history of the "links to your site"? I've seen a lot of posts here from people say "I just saw a big drop in my numbers." I don't look at this number enough to be that familiar with it. Is there a way to see if Google has suddenly chopped our numbers? I've poked around a little, but not found a method yet. Thanks, Reeves
Technical SEO | | wreevesc0 -
301'ing domain to an addon domain
My googlefu failed me in finding this... How to 301 a domain to an addon domain? Domain structure is as follows: http://addondomain.maindomain.com/ http://www.maindomain.com/addondomain/ http://www.addondomain.com/ <--(addon domain has its own domain as well) I want main domain to all point to the addon domain like so: http://www.maindomain.com/ --> http://www.addondomain.com/
Technical SEO | | JasonJackson0 -
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URL"
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URLs" but all the pages listed have a canonical with a static url , does this mean that I can ignore the warnings? Seems to me that I can but I just want to make sure?
Technical SEO | | Arnx1 -
We have been hit with the "Doorway Page" Penalty - fixed the issue - Got MSG that will still do not meet guidelines.
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
Technical SEO | | LVH
My site's URL (web address) is:www.recoveryconnection.org
Description (including timeline of any changes made): We were hit with the Doorway Pages penalty on 5/26/11. We have a team of copywriters, and a fast-working dev dept., so we were able to correct what we thought the problem was, "targeting one-keyword per page" and thin content. (according to Google) Plan of action: To consolidate "like" keywords/content onto pages that were getting the most traffic and 404d the pages with the thin content and that were targeting singular keywords per page. We submitted a board approved reconsideration request on 6/8/11 and received the 2nd message (below) on 6/16/11. ***NOTE:The site was originally designed by the OLD marketing team who was let go, and we are the NEW team trying to clean up their mess. We are now resorting to going through Google's general guidelines page. Help would be appreciated. Below is the message we received back. Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.recoveryconnection.org/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Any help is welcome. Thanks0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0 -
Should I use a "-", ":", or "|" in the title tag?
Out of habit, I've always put a "-" or dash to separate items in the title tag. However, I've noticed that more and more sites are using either a ":" or "|" in the title. Is there one that is better to use than the other?
Technical SEO | | beeneeb0 -
Starting a new product, should we use new domain or subdomain
I'm working with a company that has a high page rank on it's main domain and is looking to launch a new business / product offering. They are evaluating either creating a subdomain or launching a brand new domain. In either case, their current site will link contextually to the new site. Is there one method that would be better for SEO than the other? The new business / product is related to the main offering, but may appeal to different / new customers. The new business / product does need it's own homepage and will have a different conversion funnel than the existing business.
Technical SEO | | gallantc0