SEO ethical practice in question
-
A family friend asked me to take a look at her website.
www.designsbymaida.com
First thing i noticed is what seemed a 301 redirect or a forward to
http://funktionaldesignstudios.com/dbm-old/
So her site is hosted with what it looks like, in his site(funktonaldesigns). What does this means in terms of how google sees her site and in terms of SEO.
My thought is that he is boosting his domain name. He is getting the link juice.
Thanks for the insight and help.
-
Haha, what the??!! They're charging her for hosting and putting her in a sub directory of their own domain? Jeez, that is brazen. And they clearly must be one of those companies that profess to supply SEO but don't actually know squat about it. Tell her to fire their ass! And to ask for a refund on all her hosting payments. Tell her to tell them that all us crazies on this thread would like to throw wet kippers at them!
-
Her new site might have a problem with the content on this guy's domain. I would want him to put up a permanent redirect. But I bet he will not do it.
-
She may want to consider moving the site to another host! She can get a hosting plan at a number of reliable places for under $10 per month. Then she can start doing some SEO for her site! If she just wants a place where she can tell people, "Hey, this is my web address" then what she's got is sufficient. But, if she wants to be found by search engines, this just ain't going to work.
-
OK.... not a design proof. thanks
-
This site has been this way for like a year and she pays for hosting.
-
I agree with you entirely. Good answer.
-
She is paying for "website" hosting. Apparently Funktion Designs also does SEO. How could a company view this as acceptable.
-
Good point, Steve. It could be a design proof.
-
Are you sure the site is fully ready and released yet? When we used to build sites for people, we'd host them like that on our own site in a directory just so the client could see the site, etc... up until it was ready to go live, at which point it would have it's own hosting.
If not that, then yeah it's ridiculous and your friend should tell them it needs its own hosting.
-
** What does this means in terms of how google sees her site and in terms of SEO. **
I'd say she doesn't have a site. The service provider has usurped her site by intent or ignorance.
-
Sorry, she*
-
If he's serious about his business he'd have the site on his own domain name.
The site he's got his site hosted on doesn't carry much weight so I don’t see the point. Also, having a site hosted on another companies domain looks really unprofessional.
-
It looks to me like this isn't her website at all. Instead, she has purchased space on the funktional designs website. "www.designsbymaida.com" isn't a website - it's just a domain name that redirects to the designer's site.
So if there was any linkbuilding effort geared towards designsbymaida, then yes, funktional designs would benefit.
But, I don't this this is an ethical question. I don't think they're trying to do anything shady. They're just giving space on their website. Now, if she wants to SEO her site she's got to talk to Funktional Designs about taking her content and putting it on a self hosted site.
-
Agreed, very questionable. Maybe hes saving on hosting fees!
In the current scenario any inbound links to your friends site will be building the Domain Authority etc of the FunktionalDesignStudios domain. Thus, yes he is boosting his own domain. Though technically speaking it will also be boosting your friends site whilst it is served from a sub directory of the funktionaldesign domain.
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
-
Few Specific Migration Questions
Hi Everyone, We are about ready to do the migration for our website. I've done smaller migrations in the past, but this is a $5 million+ site. We are moving from Magento to Shopify (same domain, different hosting). I read the Moz migration guide, which was great. Any tips from you guys on things that you might have missed when doing a migration? I've Got... All url redirects completed All legacy redirects completed All image url redirects completed All meta data/content moved over It was recommended that I submit the old site's XML Sitemap to Google when the new site goes live so I can get all the redirects indexed. Do you just create an XML sitemap from the old site and upload it to the new site or how is that done? Is there anything from a server/hosting standpoint I need to watch out for? I am using Screaming Frog for the old site to record all data. I was also thinking about Deep Crawl. Any other tools that helped you with your migration? We have many pages that are www.domain.com/page.html?p=2 for example that is a page 2 of a category. Do these need to be redirected as well? Thank you!
Web Design | | vetofunk0 -
How does lazy load effect SEO?
One of my clients implemented lazy load on part of the navigation and I am wondering what the effects will be. Specifically, the drop-down navigation does not load until you hover over it. That means when you look at the page source that drop down navigation is no longer there. I am wondering if that means the google bot no longer sees the links in the navigation drop down. I am looking into this because the dev department of this company is going to do what it wants to and they need proof that its a bad move. I already suspect that it is. Too early to tell what the effects will be and not sure if there is a built-in delay in the algorithm as to when it will impact rankings. Ultimately, I am wondering if my belief that if you can't see it in the page source then as far as that particular page goes it is not seen. That would be an important thing to verify as being true.
Web Design | | KentH0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Is there SEO penalties for having .htm homepage?
In the past, I have had very good SEO rankings but have recently slipped. I am trying everything I can. Only my home page has domain/index.htm while all other pages have .html suffixes. I have been reluctant to change the home page worrying that it could further hurt my SEO. QUESTION Does it even matter? If so, will changing home page to .html have any adverse effects for SEO?
Web Design | | Kurtyj0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
SEO and Server Connectivity....
Good Morning/Evening Mozzers, I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading, **"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%." I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP. My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed? Input would be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | RobertChapman0 -
The ideal SEO e-commerce site
Hi All, I am currently writing a spec for moving our current e-commerce website and it got me thinking from an SEO perspective. We are all usually restrained by the current website set-up / CMS and there are things it can never do despite how hard we push for the changes. If you had the chance to start from a blank canvas (like I do currently) what would be on your wishlist?
Web Design | | RikkiD220 -
Old links in Google, new website affecting SEO?
Hi Guys, I have launched my website in october and it has already been indexed by google. Now I'm going to launch my redesign which comes with a new structure, content, links, etc. So the question is, do I have to resubmit my website to google to get rid of old links? Onsite Explorer shows links to my forum which has been spammed with p* stuff which has been already indexed as well. The forum is off now. I want to use SEOmoz to track my new website but I guess this could be a hard thing as old links etc will be shown as well. Is there any tool to let Google know about my changes? Does it affect my SEO in any way? Thank you for your help. Nick
Web Design | | NickITW0