How to optimize for new subdomain when root domain has all link juice and built up authority?
-
We recently took control of a root domain for a business that was not doing e-commerce. They just had a single page business card website at the root domain. However, it had been around long enough to have built up some amount of domain authority and link juice.
When we took over to enable the site with e-commerce, we redirected the root domain to point to a www subdomain where the store is now located.
Now, in my seomoz campaign, i see that all the link juice and authority stats are in the root domain metrics, and the subdomain we are tracking has nothing.
What is the best way for me to take advantage of all the built up authority for the root domain to help with the newly enabled ecommerce site at the subdomain? or am I basically starting from scratch since i have been reading that link juice does not flow as well from root domains to subdomains.
thank you and happy new year to all!
-
thanks moosa! actually i did not mention that the first thing we did was implement a 301 redirect from the root to the sub. this resulted in content in our e commerce store to immediately achieve decent rankings in the SERPS.
now I am working on getting the backlinks pointing to the root domain to point to our new subdomain.
do you think, that because of the 301 redirect, and possibly due to the use of a decent ecommerce platform, we were able to achieve rankings for keywords so quickly in the subdomain?
thanks!
-
I personally believe 301 will help as it will allow you to transfer the juice from main domain to the sub domain. Remember 301 redirection will lose some of the juice when transferring from main to the sub domain.
hope this helps!
-
I honestly don't know.
Since it has been there for a year, I would probably not move it.
-
thanks for the comment!
i'm sorry i made a mistake saying recently. i had actually meant that we had been running the store on the subdomain for almost a year now, and there is no content at all at the root domain.
i believe we just did a 301 redirect from the root to the sub once the store went live.
is moving the ecommerce into a folder on the root domain still helpful since there is no content at all in the root domain? our original intent was to just take over the domain completely and turn the root domain into an ecommerce enabled site.
-
I'd move the ecommerce into a folder on the root domain instead of into a subdomain. Then you get the authority benefits of the root 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
-
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Will doing a 301 redirect for one domain to another give the latter domain the formers links?
I have some websites that I built a few years ago that are still in existence, but I no longer have access to the sites as they weren't hosted by myself. These sites all carry a "Designed by Me" text on the footer with a link to my (now old) website. I have since done 301 redirects on the domain names that are used in the footers of these sites so they link directly to my new site. However, will these websites now show up on Google Webmasters for example as external links to my site?
Technical SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
I have consolidated my subdomains into subfolders; should i remove the subdomains also?
Hi, I have consolidated my website's many sub-domains into sub-folders. We had ~20 sub-domains. The sub-domains and the root domain shared the same code-base and sub-domain specific features were controlled using Apache's SetEnv directive in the httpd.conf includes. Now they are consolidated. I have redirected all of the sub-domains to the relevant sub-folder; so http://sub1.mysite.com now 301 redirects to http://www.mysite.com/sub1.The redirects happen in the htaccess file and all sub-domains and the root are still pointing to the same code-base. However, the Moz campaign tracker still occasionally tells me that i have optimisation opportunities at http://sub1.mysite.com and in both Bing and Google webmaster tools traffic to those sub-domains is mentioned. Should i delete the subdomains? Cheers
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Will adding a mini directory to our blog with lots of outgoing no follow links harm our authority and context
We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries. The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs. The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content. Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.
Technical SEO | | activenz1 -
Domain hacked and redirected to another domain
2 weeks ago my home page plus some others had a 301 redirect to another cloned domain for about 1 week (due to a hack).The original pages were then de-indexed and the new bad domain was indexed and in effect stole my rankings.Then the 301 was removed/cleaned from my domain and the bad domain was fully de-indexed via a request I made in WMT (this was 1 week ago).Then my pages came back into the index but without any ranking power (as if it's just in the supplemental index).It's been like this for a week now and the algorithms have not been able to correct it. So how do I get this damage undone or corrected? Can someone at Google reverse/cancel the 301 ranking transfer since the algorithms don't seem to be able to?I have the option to do a "Change of Address" in WMT from bad domain to my domain. But I don't think this would work properly because it says I also need to place a 301 on the bad domain back to mine. Would a change of address still work without the 301?Please advise/help what to do in order to get my rankings back to where they were.
Technical SEO | | Dantek0 -
Redirecting domain to the main domain (hosting cost?)
Hello Everyone, I have the following situation. There is main domain and a secondary domain that is related to the page on the main domain. I want to integrate the content of the secondary domain into the page on the main domain and redirect the secondary domain via 301 to that specific page. As i understand I can do it via .htaccess using rewrite mechanism. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection But the question is does it mean I have to keep paying for the hosting for the secondary domain? Because htaccess has to be located on the web server so I would need a hosting plan for it? Is that true? Is there any way around it? P.S. to avoid any confusion - I am talking about hosting plan - not domain registration fees
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
Switch domain from one account to another at domain registrar
We need to move our domain from one account to another at our domain registrar (which is Moniker). Both the "from" account and "to" account will be at Moniker. The "from" account currently has privacy settings enabled and we'd also put these in place for the "to" account. Has anyone done this and see any impact on SEO? Is there any big or common mistakes that I should be aware of? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0