Multiple Subdomains, my worst seo mistake. now what should i do?
-
Hello Everyone,
I have been running www.designzzz.com from lats 3 years now. and was doing extremely good with a PR 6 and 800K+ traffic monthly, but 6 months ago it started falling and falling badly.. now i am down to 350K total impressions :{ per month.
I have been blaming penguin for this and been talking to google reps continously over it. they assured me that my site is not under any type of manual spam etc.
Then i begin think and i realized taht was exactly the time when i launched a few subdomains as sub parts of my site like coding.designzzz.com , wordpress.designzzz.com , photograph.designzzz.com , shop.designzzz.com in the making...
now is the part that i can't undo these subdomains.. what should i do ?
my search traffic is almost killed.
I seriously need insight on this guys :
thanks in advance!
Ayaz
-
Thank you so much,
ofcourse i will do keep you updated :}
cheers
-
No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hello Devanur,
Thank you so much for the insight and pointing me to the right direction.
i did it like you said. please take a look and tell me if everything is fine.
http://coding.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/coding/
http://wordpress.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/wordpress/ ofcourse with 301s .
same goes for all other subdomains :}
I am curious how much time will it take for my traffic to start getting better?
thanks again
-
Hi Ayaz,
As you say that the sub-domains have their own original content, then please go ahead and put a 301 re-direction to the respective sub-directories on the main domain. Everything should be back to normal as per my personal experience goes. IMO, sub-domains can never be considered sub-directories by any search engine as for Google, sub-domains should be created only when the purpose of their creation is thoroughly justified with much needed diversity like a blog or a forum and/or a topic that deserves branching from that of the main domain's.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.
-
There are certain very specific circumstances where Google treats subdomains as part of the main domain for reporting purposes, Ayaz, but as far as SEO is concerned, subdomains pretty much always have to stand alone as separate sites.
Paul
-
Reverse proxy – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
That should do it for you.
-
Hello,
Thank you so much for the suggestion. as i have wordpress installations in subdomains i am not sure it will be easy to do teh redirect because of paths issues. but yeah i am gona try that.
Some people said that google now treats subdomains as subdirectories so that might not be the issue so i am confused.
About moving content from domain to subdomain , nop not really. subdomains got its own original content.
thanks again.
cheers
-
Rafi has it exactly right - as I would do it. 301 the subdomain to the appropriate page. Then make sure you resubmit a sitemap and ping all of your pages. I think you'll be fine after that. Great post Devanur Rafi.
-
Hey Ayaz,
I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.
The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/
Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.
I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.
By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Blocking subdomains without blocking sites...
So let's say I am working for bloggingplatform.com, and people can create free sites through my tools and those sites show up as myblog.bloggingplatform.com. However that site can also be accessed from myblog.com. Is there a way, separate from editing the myblog.com site code or files, for me to tell google to stop indexing myblog.bloggingplatform.com while still letting them index myblog.com without inserting any code into the page load? This is a simplification of a problem I am running across. Basically, Google is associating subdomains to my domain that it shouldn't even index, and it is adversely affecting my main domain. Other than contacting the offending sub-domain holders (which we do), I am looking for a way to stop Google from indexing those domains at all (they are used for technical purposes, and not for users to find the sites). Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM1 -
Rankings of Subdomains vs. Main Domain
Here's a puzzler... Our main domain (www.ides.com) doesn't appear in Google (but does on Bing and other engines). We think this is due to duplicate content which we're fixing. However our website's subdomains continue to appear prominently in SERPs, even on Google - here are some examples: IDES Prospector = prospector.ides.com IDES = support.ides.com Cycolac FR15 = catalog.ides.com Why would Google penalize a main domain and its subdomains?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Google Places for Local SEO
I am a webmaster at a company with over 50 clients, and I have to list the businesses of our clients in Google Places. Most of our clients are architecture agencies and construction companies, so they are unfamiliar with these things, and that's why I have to list their businesses on Google Places. It would be easier for me to manage all the places for these different businesses if I create the places with one gmail account. Can I use one gmail account to list the businesses for all our clients?
Technical SEO | | Arianittt2 -
What do we do now?
OK where do we start? Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company... Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions, tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site. YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
Scott0 -
How To SEO Mobile Pages?
hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps
Technical SEO | | david3050 -
Multiple Region/Language Solutions
So I understand that this is a fairly broad question but I am trying to work through this on a bunch of different levels with a bunch of different sites that have multiple different issues. First I am wondering if I have an e-commerce site on a .com that is used to serve to different languages and locales around the world. Instead of a Domain.com/ES/ for a site that is supposed to serve Spain and a Domain.com/DE/ for a site that is supposed to serve Germany, we do Domain.com/en_ES/ and Domain.com/es_ES/ for an English and a Spanish version for our consumers that come from Spain. My first question is this a bad way to set this up just from a structure standpoint and my second question is what do I do about duplicate content on different locales but same languages? I am afraid that if I rel=canonical this to 1 region for each language that it may not show up in SE's for other regions but the same language. (Example Brazil and Portugal for Portuguese, Belgium and Netherlands for Dutch, Canada and France for French, Spain and Mexico for Spanish, etc...) Second do the language meta tags actually do anything or not? I am finding mixed opinions on this. Third what is the IDEAL website structure for a website that will serve multiple languages and locales from the same ccTLD? I understand this is not ideal but what is the best setup with this situation? Again I know this is a broad question but I am coming across a lot of e-commerce sites wanting help and dealing with this situation. The duplicate content thing is worrisome and I want good, localized indexing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
What do I do about multiple listings for doctors on InfoUSA?
I'm doing local SEO for a chiropractic clinic that has four chiropractors. On InfoUSA and therefor on CitySearch, Insiderpages, Healthgrades, etc, there are individual listings for each chiropractor with the clinic's name, address and phone number. Google places pulls reviews from those other sites and I don't think they will make the connection on the listings. The tricky thing is that health-care review sites such as healthgrades.com have reviews for doctors and not for clinics necessarily. What's the best way to organize this? Should I get all of these listings consolidated into one listing for the clinic in general that has the same info as the Google Places listing? Should I get the individual chiropractor listings deleted?
Technical SEO | | jargomang0