SEO implications of off-site secure Donation page
-
Hi Mozzers, I have a non-profit client that defends wildlife and public lands in the western US. The huge website is currently not responsive so we are working on that. In the meantime, we will be making the Action pages (such as Donations, Sign Petition, Get Newsletter) pages responsive. This will be housed under a new domain.
My question is, what are SEO best practices for doing this? Does it negatively impact SEO to have a visitor "booted" from a site to a second secure site? Does Google know that the Donation site is in fact fulfillment and is linked to the original site?
Also, what about domain implications? Is it best to have the name of the non-profit in the domain or sub, like this: https://saveanimals.secure.com/donate?
Thanks everyone!
-
Hi James,
Great question! My two cents would be as follows:
Firstly, I'm assuming that there is no way that you can make the responsive pages show up with the same domain as the current non-responsive site.
I'm guessing that you are building these pages on a different platform than the main site, but it is possible to use multiple platforms on a single domain (for instance, many websites build their blog on Wordpress and their main site using something different) - so I'm curious about why in this case you are choosing to make it a totally separate domain.
Assuming that this is the only way to do it, my first question would be: are these pages something that would be indexed normally on the main site? You mention they are 'Action' pages - search engines may not need to index transaction pages, for example, where the only purpose is to submit a payment or sign up for something. Unless you also expect these pages to rank as entry pages, but if users are navigating to these pages primarily from a different landing page, they may not be relevant to search engines at all.
If this is the case, and you are still concerned about appearing to send users to a different website, you could consider making the donate button to these pages initially link to a page on the existing domain (like www.maindomain.org/secure) which could then immediately redirect to the secure version. You could nofollow this link and block the transaction pages on the other domain from search (I usually see no reason to have purely transactional pages indexed, but I may be missing some context in this case.) However, this may run the risk of looking like you are trying to do something sneaky with redirects.
You could also include a note on the first page (the one the user is on before being taken to the secure site), next to that 'donate'/'signup' button/link that states "by clicking this link, you will be taken to our secure platform at 'domain.com' to complete your donation/signup".
I do like the idea of including the name of the charity in this secondary domain if possible, to help make it clear that they are connected. You could optimize the pages' meta data to include the name of the charity as well.
I don't believe there is a negative consequence (generally speaking) to sending a user off-site - unless you appear to be running some sort of 'doorway' page scheme, or using sneaky redirects to show Google one thing and the user something else. My one caveat: I'm not sure what you mean by "booting" the user- I could see it potentially seeming problematic if the user is automatically sent somewhere without choosing to navigate to the other domain...it could even fall under the category of 'malicious behavior'. But as long as the user is choosing to click on a link that takes them to a 'donate' or 'sign up' page, even if it's hosted on a different domain, I don't see that creating a major issue for Google.
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 to handle images (lazy loading, compressing, caching...) to impact page load and thus SEO?
Hi all, I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images. There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much: Page caching and compressing: standard Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling. Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time. What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP? To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder. Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible). Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm. Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements Page Blank / Site Not Ranking Well
I have an ecommerce site that is not ranking well currently. It has about 1,000 pages indexed in Google but very few appear to be ranking. I normally find issues in Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements but for some reason it does not see a problem with the site. There are problems, trust me. Moz shows many issues. Google nothing! There is a problem somewhere but I am not seeing it. Why are HTML Improvements blank and the site not ranking? Am I in the dreaded sandbox? Any ideas? Sean We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optin0 -
How can we improve the seo on our site?
Hello everyone. I have been reading through this site for a while and tried to put everything together that I have learned so far. Would any of you mind looking at our site and providing any pointers or areas we can still improve on or areas I completely missed. I appreciate any feedback you can give! Our site is faithology.com Thanks again! Brandon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero0 -
Best way to host multiple sites for maximum seo
We have over 100 websites we built for clients that we currently host on 1 shared godaddy hosting account. They each have a link to us but since they are all under one shared account, we feel that we are not maximizing the inbound link potential. I've looked into c class hosting but found that either the ip's were flagged as spam, or they shared nameservers which defeats the purpose. I've also been told that since the c class ip's a hosting company gives to you are all owned by them, that also defeats the purpose. Anyone have any solutions besides opening 130 accounts with different hosting companies? Also, will it make any difference changing existing sites onto different hosts now or are they already tainted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopet0 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0