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
-
Login to see more (some text hidden by CSS height and jquery) will it ruin SEO?
Hey SEO masters! I have a website that is smashing it for SEO in Australia. In an effort to increase a user base I want to make it so only logged in users can see all the content. So today, I launched a new feature hiding content using CSS 'height:' property. The content is obviously still there and if you were a developer you could easily 'inspect element' and remove that CSS style to see everything... There are a few other tweaks i made for logged out users, but that only affects some json. Question: will this affect my SEO rankings? Here is a direct example: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/s/perth if you sign up, there is about 1400words of content.
Web Design | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Is placing an H1 tag below a slideshow a bad practice?
Hello All, It is to my understanding that it is a best practice to have a single H1 headline that corresponds to your title tag at the top of your page, above your content for the best On-Site Optimization. We are developing a site that uses a big slideshow with text on each slide, and are concerned that placing the H1 Headline below this will be a bad practice. Would a better option be to have the slide show text on the image and place no alt tags on the slides, so that the crawlers accessing the page overlook this and see the H1 below the slider first? We need to maintain the slider for design purposes, but would like the site to optimized. A similar example to what the slider will look like is as follows: http://www.boviskyle.com/ However, we look to have optimized, "10x" content below the slider with a solid H1 headline as well. Thank You!
Web Design | | Armen-SEO0 -
Website Redesign SEO Checklist
I am looking for a comprehensive Website Redesign SEO Checklist. One of my customers is changing its website design (including URL structure) and I need all kinds of suggestions for a smooth SEO operation. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | stradiji0 -
Simple Wordpress Question regarding Footer Link
I have a client with a site that has the company that built their website's link in the footer. How can I remove this? I am pretty proficient with Wordpress but I am drawing a blank. The site is www.northatlantacleaning.com Thanks and I do extend the courtesy of awarding 'Best Answer' and thumbs up etc to good responses.
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
SEO For Lead Generation
From an SEO point of view, is it okay to have a sites focus to be Lead Generation? We will do a small amount of blogging and we'll also have longer form sales pages on the site... but the main focus would be lead generation pages that we'd target for the SERPs. TO ME... this seems fairly spammy. If we had 50-60 landing pages with only 100-300 words of copy on them. If this is "okay" then how much should we altar up these landing pages in terms of content? None of them will be direct copies... but I just want to make sure that we stay above a ratio that would be good for SEO. Then lastly... How many main terms can we expect to target with a landing page? Should we focus each landing page to a keyword, or can we target a few and still rank effectively?
Web Design | | lifeseo0 -
International SEO issues for multiple sites
We currently have 3 websites: oursite.co.uk oursite.fr oursite.ch We also own Oursite.com, and that URL currently redirects to Oursite.fr. We are considering a complete site redesign and a possible merge of the 3 sites. Assumptions: ** the 3 sites currently receive organic search traffic to varying degrees
Web Design | | darkgreenguy
** Oursite.ch is almost identical to Oursite.fr in terms of the site content
** Our target market is NOT the USA for English-language searches. It is the UK. With a re-design, we see our options as follows: Merge the 3 sites and make Oursite.com the "main site" and then have subfolders as follows: /uk /fr /ch Keep the 3 sites as they are. We see Option 1 as the best in terms of saving time when updating the site, and saving money paid to the site developers (1 site vs 3 sites). We see Option 2 as the best in terms of ability of the site to rank, as well as confidence of searchers when seeing our site in the search results (in other words, a person searching in France would be more likely to buy and/or submit a form on our site if they saw Oursite.fr vs Oursite.com/fr). I guess we're looking for some suggestions/guidance here. Are we missing any big issues? Does anyone have experience with an issue such as this? Thank you in advance...
-Shawn0 -
Why can't I ask this question - It is not too short
I tried to post a question which was at least 15 words long and received an error saying the question was less than 5 characters QrXcp
Web Design | | FFTCOUK0