Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
-
Hi,
I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) .
Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain.
Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation?
any help is appreciated!
-
Thanks for the advise Carson!
-
Firstly, I wouldn't worry about your customers creating "low-quality links" unless your customers are exclusively spammers. Low authority links and spam links are two very different things in Google's eyes.
If the links point to pages that a user could not see without logging in, simply use a meta robots noindex to ensure the pages won't appear in search results. This isn't especially critical, since the page would be unlikely to appear in results anyway, but you can follow the best practice of blocking content behind a wall if you're worried about it.
If you do have a lot of customers running sites Google might consider spammy, let me know and we'll talk about it from there. Otherwise you don't need to worry.
-
Hi Nakul,
Thanks for the reply.
Sorry I wasn't a little more specific in my initial question. Anyhow our secure site is not at all the same as our public site. The secure site is used by our customers to access their accounts and use our applications. An example would be a click-to-call. If one of our customers uses our click to call service on every page of their website, then we will have several links from that customer's site back to our secure site. My concern is that this could be negatively impacting our public site since both use the same root domain.
Any thoughts on whether or not this could be a problem?
Thanks again for your help!
-
Are the URLs, pages/filenames 100% in sync between the secure subdomain and the main/public site ? If that's the case (and if it makes sense, you add a canonical on your secure.subdomain.com to public.subdomain.com pages). This way your secure.subdomain.com will not get indexed in the SERPS and will act as a 301 redirect.
P.S. Only do this if the pages are 100% in SYNC and the only difference is price etc. This way only 1 version of the pages get indexed. Users linking to your secure site will NOT get redirected, they will still see the secure site. But when the bots follow the link, they will see the canonical link as a strong directive not to index this page but your public equivalent of the same page.
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
-
Via this intermediate link issue - for (multiple domains) same brand
Hi, I have sudden increase in links pointing to my .com website from my .ca website, i have recently launched a new ,.ca website to target Canada and i don't know why i see 1000's of links from .ca is point to my .com websites has backlinks and i am afraid it could hurt my seo for .com, because ,ca is having no domain authority or no ranking currently. however .com has good rankings currently with decent link profile Can any one help me on how i can get rid of this backlinks from .ca to com should i just add no follow links to all my links which are pointing from .ca to .com? Please help Regards Anoop
Technical SEO | | Vitarockstore0 -
Domain structure for US Local Sites
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US. For countries these websites will be: www.site.co.uk www.site.fr etc.... For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each? Meaning, should it be: nj.site.com or site-nj.com
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Will Moving to a Different Country Hosting Affect my SEO?
Hello Mozzers, I have a website with the country specific TLD. It's very new (less than a month old) and already started ranking for the main target term (It's #5 as I write this). It's a somewhat exact match domain. Right now I am on shared hosting and the way in which the site is growing, I think I might need to move to a VPS soon. Right now, I pay extra and chose a shared hosting in my own country. But VPS in my country is very costly. I'd get twice the features if I go with a US hosting provider for the same price. If I move to a new VPS outside of my country, would it affect my rankings? What do you think? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jombay0 -
Site Wide Links
I have a link on pr 3 home page website placed in the side bar. It is on a WordPress website that spans a couple hundred pages and the side bar is on every page. The majority of the pages are not ranked or have any pr. Can this affect me negatively?
Technical SEO | | raph39880 -
My site has dropped three places in one day i do not understand it
Hi our site has always been either number one in google or at the bad times number two for the search word gastric band hypnotherapy but today we have dropped three places and we do not understand what has happened Can anyone please have a look and see what we need to do to get back on top. the site that is above us does not have much information on the subject so we are very puzzled here is our site www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Adding no follow links on my site
I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Merging two sites into one
I have two websites, www.joecline.com and www.affinityproperties.com. Originally, I wanted joecline.com to be focused on west austin only. I now realize that I only have time to really handle the promotion of one site. I'm wondering SEOwise, which url would be better to keep. I would consolidate all content on one site and 301 the migrated site to the new URLs in the domain which I would keep. Any ideas would be great. Thanks Joe
Technical SEO | | simplesimon0 -
Sub Domain SEO
I am thinking to Add Sub Domains to get better rankings for Local Searches. So I will develop City Specific Sites with Specific Language. For Example qatar.wisnetsol.com. IT will be in Arabic. If my Good standing and Ranking on Google for wisnetsol.com will help my subdomain to rank better? if we setup wisnetsol.com/qatar, how it can target Qatar in Google Webmaster tools? Will links for qatar.wisnetsol.com and wisnetsol.com are seprate? What do you think about this strategy? Is it good or bad?
Technical SEO | | Khuram0