Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
-
Hi there!
I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now.
In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly :
http://{some-city}.duproprio.com
This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords.
But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234
Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains
This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains...
Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority?
Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic?
Thanks a big lot!
-
Hi Matthew,
I think your suggestion is great, as it would instruct google of the fact that I'm aware I have duplicate content, and want to tell him which one should be prioritized. However there are other aspects that would not be fixed in terms of seo that I'd like to get fixed with this "project"
If I keep all versions active with this canonical tag, I'm still spreading my incoming link juice through different subdomains, thus minimizing my potential domain authority...
For this reason I'm still thinking of making the real big & bold move... which is still giving me goosebumps!
-
I think one of the best resolutions to this problem would be that instead of just redirecting everything is to just add canonical tags to the duplicated pages that then point to the page with the original content on.
This will tell Google that the webpage contains information that is taken from another page and you wont be punished for this.
For example, on the http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page, the canonical tag would link to the http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page (or vice-versa depending on which page is the priority). So the code would be:
href="http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page" rel="canonical"/>
Hope this helps.
Matt.
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
-
Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?
A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page). A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions. Here's a bit more info: For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots. At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right? We did the following: Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page. Took the canonical off of /boots. Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots". Resubmitted the sitemap. Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly_Edwards0 -
Duplicating relevant category content in subcategories. Good or bad for google ranking?
In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages. For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.0 -
Duplicate page content errors for Web App Login
Hi There I have 6 duplicate content errors, but they are for the WebApp login from our website. I have put a Noindex on the Sitemap to stop google from indexing them to see if that would work. But it didn't. These links as far as I can see are not even on the website www.skemaz.net, but are links beyond the website and on the Web App itself eg : <colgroup><col width="529"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Skemazer
| http://login.skemaz.net |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2Fchangepassword |
| http://login.skemaz.net/Login |
| http://login.skemaz.net/LogIn?ReturnUrl=%2FHome | Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards Sarah0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Redirect issue launching duplicate product categories on another TLD
Dear Mozzerz We run this e-commerce website (superstar.dk) where we are selling all different kinds of wristwatches from different brand names (Casio, Garmin, Suunto etc). We just bought another website selling watches (xxx.com) and therefore we would like to move some of the content from superstar.dk to the new website xxx.com, making superstar.dk into a more niche website. So we are basically taking a brand with all the products in it and shutting it down on superstar.dk and instead launching it on xxx.com. Superstar.dk will still be running, just with a more niche product- and brand selection. So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)? A few examples:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superstardenmark
superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin
superstar.dk/suunto -> xxx.com/suunto
etc..
superstar.dk/product1 -> xxx.com/product1
superstar.dk/product2 -> xxx.com/product2
etc.0 -
WMT Showing Duplicate Meta Description Issues Altough Posts Were Redirected
Dear Moz Community, Some time ago we've change the structure of our website and we've redirected the old URL's to the new ones. About 2,000 posts were redirected at that time. While checking Webmaster Tools a few days ago I've discovered that about 500 duplicate meta-description issues appear in the "HTML Improvements" area. To my surprise, altough the old posts were redirected to the new path, WMT sees the description of the old posts similar with the one of the new post. Moreover, after changing the structure all meta-descriptions were modified and they weren't the same used before the restructure. For example I've redirected /blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ to /destinations/greater-london/merton-sw19/taxi-transfer-to-london-city-airport-from-merton/ Now they are shown as having duplicate content. I've checked the redirects and they are working. I get the same error from the redirected pages for about 150 titles. Did anyone else get this errors or can you please offer me some suggestions about how I can fix this? Thank you in advance! Tiberiu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiberiu0