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
-
Removing Multiple 301 Redirects
During my last redesign (and migration to Drupal) some of the updated SEO friendly url's on the new site were misspelled. Rather than updating the 301 redirects to point to the correct page the developer just added an additional 301 redirect. So it was redirected like this website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-paige (301 to) website.com/new-page Instead of website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-page I'll be finishing another redesign and updating to https soon, should I remove the redirect to the misspelled domain and just have one 301 from the original page? These multiple redirects have been up for over a year. Thanks for any specific advice!
Technical SEO | | talltrees0 -
Feedback for the onpage seo for this site
Hi, Can the seo gurus here, suggest me if any on page factors affect my site? http://www.ridpiles.com/ Recently i have added, the following post to the main home page, http://www.ridpiles.com/2012/02/different-types-of-cures-for-piles/ This page is somewhat different than the title keyword. As the main page titile is "hemorrhoids treatment". The newly created blog post is on "cure for piles" Does this blog post has any affect on the on page factors due to different title? And do i require any changes regarding the on page seo? Will be waiting for your replies.
Technical SEO | | Indexxess0 -
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 -
Wordpress plugins for SEO
Hello I am new to wordpress I just have started using it. Can anyone suggest me some useful tools / plugins / setting for SEO? I am further intrested in sepeeding up Wp. Any good advive on wp an seo would be appriciated.
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Seo template for new website
I am revamping my website (www.UltimateBasicTraining.com). It's going to be major and I am concerned about the potential traffic loss since over 60% of my overall traffic comes from organic search results in the military basic training area. Are there any good SEO website templates I can start from? I see a lot out there but would prefer the advice of professionals. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TheVolkinator0 -
Multiple Google Places listings under review
I have a client with a waste removal business who had multiple listings on his Google Places account for different service locations. Over the last four months I have been creating separate listings for each separate service location, each under a different Google account and with a unique business name, address, phone number and website URL. They have all been verified by postcard and listed separately in local directories so that they have citations. As I have been creating the new listings I have also been deleted the old ones to make sure they are not flagged as duplicates. 2 months ago all the listings in the client's Google Places account were placed under review. I made some changes and submitted it for re-review but no go with Google. Now all the new listings I set up have also suddenly been placed under review. About a week ago I noticed that information in two separate Google Places listings was being mixed up - for example, the website URL for one listing was being shown in another listing. There is no connection between these two listings other than that they were both set up from the same IP address so this seems very strange. I reported this to Google and asked them to sort it out, then all of a sudden I found that ALL of the new listings had been placed under review. So now my client has no active listings at all. He can't afford to wait another 2 months for Google to review all the listings again so I am wondering whether the best course of action would just be to delete everything and start over. Any advice would be most welcome!
Technical SEO | | EssexGirl0 -
Subdomain Robots.txt
If I have a subdomain (a blog) that is having tags and categories indexed when they should not be, because they are creating duplicate content. Can I block them using a robots.txt file? Can I/do I need to have a separate robots file for my subdomain? If so, how would I format it? Do I need to specify that it is a subdomain robots file, or will the search engines automatically pick this up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnECF0