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.
Domain Masking SEO Impact
-
I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site?
-
Glad to be of service!
-
Thank you for this response. This helps me a ton as I discuss with our web team on the best way to set the coding for the site so that we are not registering errors but also not hurting the actual site in any way.
-
This is a good idea, but Robots.txt stops pages being crawled - it doesn't stop pages being indexed. For that you need to fire the Meta No-Index directive on the affected URLs. If you can't edit their code you can fire the same directive through the HTTP header via X-Robots. On that linked post, you'll need to scroll down a little. If possible you could also alter those URLs to serve status code 410 (gone) so that Google knows, those URLs aren't really on your site
Note that you'll need to make the changes on the 'affected' site, not the site which is the 'source' of the masked pages / data. If you make the changes there, that site will have all the Google traffic killed as well (and they'll probably want to punch you!)
I recommend that you lead with hard signals and directives which stop Google indexing the pages on the 'affected' site (which is receiving the masked URLs / content and doesn't want them to rank). Once the pages fall out of Google's index, then you swoop in behind and put the robots.txt stuff in to stop them ever coming back
-
Depends on the CMS you use. Many CMS's can click a quick button to not index in Google search.
If that isnt an option, do it through a robots.txt file in webmaster tools.
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
-
Lost ranking after domain switch
I recently migrated from https://whitefusemedia.com to https://whitefuse.com. The website URL structure and content remained the same and I followed all the best practice guidance regarding checks on the new domain and appropriate 301 redirects. I have seen traffic drop by about 50% and the traffic that is still coming through is mainly coming through links still listed by Google under the old domain (https://whitefusemedia.com). Is this normal? Should I expect to see this bounce back, or is there anything I can do now to regain the rankings?
Technical SEO | | wfm-uk0 -
JavaScript page loader - SEO impact
Hello all,
Technical SEO | | Lvet
I am working on a site that has a bizarre page load system. All pages get loaded trough the same Javascript snippet, for example: Changing the values in the form changes the page that is loaded. The most incredible thing is that, against my expectations, pages do get indexed by Google.
My question is: "Does loading pages dynamically using JavaScript affect the overall SEO performance?" Why are pages getting indexed? Thank you for shedding light on this.
Cheers
Luca0 -
Loading images below the fold? Impact on SEO
I got this from my developers. Does anyone know if this will be a SEO issue? We hope to lazy-load images below the fold where possible, to increase render speed - are you aware of any potential issues with this approach from an SEO point of view?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng1 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
How Does Dynamic Content for a Specific URL Impact SEO?
Example URL: http://www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy Dog Services/default.aspx The above page is generated dynamically depending on what province the visitor visits from. For example, a visitor from BC would see something quite different than a visitor from Nova Scotia; the intent is that the information shown should be relevant to the user of that province. How does this effect SEO? How (or from what location) does Googlebot decide to crawl the page? I have considered a subdirectory for each province, though that comes with its challenges as well. One such challenge is duplicate content when different provinces may have the same information for some pages. Any suggestions for this?
Technical SEO | | ey_sja0 -
Changing menus regularly - will this impact SEO
We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona
Technical SEO | | fionah0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0