Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
-
Background:
We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt).
Question:
Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
-
IMO it is more about ease of use for the end user and less about SEO. If you have a good help sub-domain, it will automatically redirect users to the product site.
Still If I had to make a decision, I would have compared metrics like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate of help site and main site. If help metrics are better than the main site, adding content to main will add value else it will deplete value. Also if it is only one product, it makes sense to have help within main site bur for multiple products, you should be better off with sub domains (product wise and not docs vs main).
Please see and decide what is best for your users first, keeping SEO at second priority. Hope it helps.
- Nitin
-
I really like Jason's response and I watched the video. Still, from sheer gut instinct, I would move those docs to the main domain. Call me crazy, it's just seems like the right thing to do.
-
The debate about subdomains vs. subdirectories has been going on for a long time. You have to be careful about reading old stuff, because the best answer has changed over time based on changes to search algorithms.
I.E. There was a time when "link-juice" was treated separately on each sub-domain, so subdomains could dilute your effort. There was also an era, when Google would allow a max of two results per sub-domain on a SERP, and so people would use multiple sub-domains to get the potential for more links on a SERP.
At the moment, they appear to be roughly equivalent And so the decision usually comes down to other convenience issues rather than SEO benefit In your case, since you're already on a sub-domain I probably wouldn't bother to move them and do all the re-directs, ect...
I'm basing this advice, largely on Matt Cutts video answer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk
-
Yea, Sean
I agree that you should move it under the main website. I am not an expert at this but I can definitely see how it can potentially dilute your juice from the main website. It almost seems like it should be on the resources page. I see how you guys have " Showcase| Case Studies| Hosting| ..." I would stick it between " Case Studies" and " Hosting."
What was the rationale behind putting it on a different domain?
-
Hi Sean,
My gut reaction is "Heck Yes!" I would move the documentation, but perhaps, if you can convert it to .pdf file types, so you can embed a link back to your relevant page or main website from inside the document. This will also keep a link in the document if someone decides to share it off site somewhere, making for some handy links back to your site.
Interested to know what others think!
Dana
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
-
Heroku, Subdomains, redirecting to different servers & SEO
Hi all, I've got a big question. I'm helping out with digital marketing at a non-profit that I volunteer with. We're working on developing an on site blog for our site, because we've realized we need that middle of the funnel content. Our issue has been taking up much of the developers' time & we're really working out the kinks with the system, so I'm trying to alleviate that with a light blog solution. We're considering installing a wordpress site on a separate server from the main site & sending traffic over to that. The primary questions: Do we negatively impact our main site by having a link to a different domain in the topnav? Do we positively impact the main site by developing SEO content on a redirected&masked URL? What are the ramifications of redirecting a subdomain to another server? Would we be better off using something like Ghost? A good example would be: Visit theMainDomain
Technical SEO | | Alternatively.marketing
Click: blog on topnav
Redirect to: theSecondDomain/blog [masked as theMainDomain/blog]
Click: home on topnav
Redirect to: theFirstDomain/blog0 -
MOving from one page format to another
I have a page that I optimized for a valuable keyword (at least it is to me!) and it gets very good traffic. Problem is that the page needs to constantly updated with new "news" related to the topic area. I have developed a page-type that will have the same static content as the original page, but it will now automtaically index related content from the rest of the site so the "news" section stay fresh and up-to-date. I am now okay to do something like permanently redirect that page to the newly built one? I have also run the newly designed page through tests on Moz and it receives on receives an A-grade from the on-page optimization tool. I am just wanting to ensure I cover all bases, because I do not want to risk losing the top search result and all that valuable traffic.
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
Does a subdomain benefit from being on a high authority domain?
I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
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
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Moving content between two separate domains...
Hello I am looking for advice regarding moving content from one site to another. We have two websites: Site 1: E-commerce site, with content weaved in throughout the visitor journey.
Technical SEO | | DJR1981
Site 2: Blog-style site, used to archive magazine (which we own) articles online. Both sites exist on completely separate domains. Over time, Site 2 has received a lot less attention due to a change in our business objectives. As a result of this, this site is not as up-to-date as it could be and we're now starting to think about winding the brand down. However, some of the content (mostly feature-pieces, reviews etc) on Site 2 is really good and it would be a shame to just see such high quality stuff disappear into the ether. Ideally, we would like migrate some of the content on Site 2 to Site 1. The reasons for this are mostly to improve things from a visitor perspective, but also to gain any positive SEO points from adding such pieces to our main domain. I've had a look through and a lot of the articles from Site 2 are indexed. Is it going to be a case of selecting the pieces I want and then adding a 301s to those pages so they're no longer found/visable before re-publishing them on Site 1? Sorry if this is a bit of silly question, just wanted some advice to ensure I go about it the right way. Thanks!0 -
Move the content from mycompany.es to mycompany.com is worth it?
Hi, I've been using mycompany**.es** for 6 month and i'm quite happy with the results, recently I had the oprtunity to buy the same domain with .com (mycompany**.com**). It is worth it to move all the content to the new domain or i wont get any beneffit to be at .com insted of .es? Other facts: my target customer is spain
Technical SEO | | alfonsmr
the page is in spanish only
mycompany.es is 6 month old
mycompany**.com** is 8 years old Thanks in advance.0 -
Subdomains & SEO
Exact match domains are great for ranking but what about domains which contain just half of the full phrase being targeted? eg. If you owned the domain rentals.co.uk but wanted to target the search term "car rentals" Regarding backlinks, would it be best to link back to your rentals.co.uk homepage (using anchor text "car rentals") or to one of the following: a) www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals b) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk c) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals
Technical SEO | | martyc1