Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
-
Hello,
Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain.
Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows?
Has anyone dealt with something similar?
Thanks very much in advance,
-
Thanks everyone, really helpful!
-
If its essentially a duplicate, thin content Login Screen... NoIndex, No Follow the page.
-
I would say it is unnatural, and therefore any links you have should be no-followed.
-
No. Thin content carries algorithmic penalty as well. Careful. Might want to stick with option 2.
-
Hi everyone,
Thanks for your recommendations. In a way, every subdomain is custom since every client's name is different and it prompts the client to login back into cPanel to reactivate the hosting.
The subdomains are not in a way 'expired', they are expired from a customer's point of view, but they are active and there is no duplicate content, since it says 'You are trying to access x.y.com', so it is different for every subdomain.
But they are all very low quality one-page subdomains, is it useful to have them as links towards the main site?
-
- Custom 404 page?
-
Options:
1.) set rel="canonical" tags on all of them referencing the main page within the href portion of the tag
2.) no-crawl, no-index the pages
3.) all of the above
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 domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Consolidating two separate domains and redirecting towards a new replatformed domain
A client has two different sites selling the same products with the same content, they would like to replatform onto Magento while redirecting those 2 sites to the new URL. The question is, besides monitoring the 301 redirects is there anything else to take into consideration when consolidating two sites into one new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RocketWeb0 -
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 -
Move webshop domain to the brand domain?
Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan0 -
Best practices for handling https content?
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with. Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly. Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently. One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket. Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place. I guess my question is really about best practices when using https. How can I avoid duplication issues? When do I need to use rel=canonical? What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Homepage Content
I have a website which perform very well for some keywords and much less for other keywords. I would like to try to optimize the keywords with less performance. Let's say our website offers 2 main services: KEYWORD A and KEYWORD Z. KEYWORD Z is a very important keyword for us in terms of revenue. KEYWORD A gives us position Nr 1 on our local Google and redirect properly the visitors to xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php KEYWORD Z perform badly and gives us position Nr 7 on local Google search. 90% Google traffic is sent to xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php and the other 10% is sent to the home page of the website. The Homepage is a "soup" of all the services our company offers, some are important (KEYWORD Z) and other much less important. In order to optimize the keyword KEYWORD Z we were thinking to make a permanent redirect for xxxxxx.com/keyword-z/keyword-z.php to xxxxxx.com and optimize the content of the Homepage to ONLY describe our KEYWORD Z. I am not sure if Google gives more importance in the content of the homepage or not. Of course links on the homepage to other pages like xxxxxx.com/keyword-a/keyword-a.php will still exists. The point for us is maybe to optimize better the homepage and give more importance to the KEYWORD Z. Does it make sense or not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netbuilder0 -
Changing domain extension to detoxify a domain
Hi there, A linkbuilding company that has been building links for us has not gained any sustained results. They have advised that our domain may be toxic, and that we should consider permanent redirecting from .co.uk to another domain extension in order to remedy this. Is this a recommendation worth considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0