Deleting Subdomain - 301 to Homepage Best Option?
-
We have a subdomain with lots of content that we think Google may consider thin, so we're thinking of removing it to improve our SEO. Is the best way to do this to simply remove the directory and then 301 everything to our homepage?
Basically the subdomain consists of product images with links to retailers where they can be purchased. We've basically used it to refer our Facebook fans to when they like a product they've seen on our Facebook page, so the subdomain was not meant to rank for SEO purposes. However, it is integrated with our main webpage, and it is possible that it is hurting our SEO efforts.
The subdomain is photos.yournextshoes.com and the main domain www.yournextshoes.com
-
Well, just took a look at your subdomain links and there's nothing bad there. You can go ahead and remove the subdomain placing a 301 to your homepage.
-
Basically it takes a lot of time to update the subdomain, so we'd rather just remove it and instead post more content on Facebook.
-
What don't you just block Google and other search engines from crawling/indexing the subdomain?
That will keep the content there while not affect your SEO at all (and prevent from having bad backlinks from subdomain now pointing to domain (if any) by using a 301).
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
-
Deleting Tags without Penalty?
Hello - We have a site with over 1,000 tags. We added too many and would like a fresh start as they are creating a lot of duplicate pages on the site. What is the best way to go about deleting all of these tags without being penalized by Google? Is there a way to tell Google direclty to stop crawling them? We would prefer to not have that many pages just sit as 404 errors on the site. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | FamiliesLoveTravel0 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
301 redirects without .htaccess
I have a client that recently moved from an old ZenCart e-commerce site to Volusion. The domain name did not change. We need to redirect a bunch of the old URLs; however, Volusion's redirect tool does not work for URLS with "?" . The old ZenCart structure is: http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=563 Volusion is a hosted platform and we do not have access to the .htaccess file. Any suggestions on a workaround? Thanks!Nancy <colgroup><col width="960"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NancyVPS
| |0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Best Pracice to Obsolete a Blog
Hi, I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site. I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are 1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant. 2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed. Thoughts? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
Page Analysis Difference Between Root and Subdomain
I have a site where the canonical version is the subdomain www, with a permanent redirect to ensure this is so. When I do a page analysis from the MozBar for the domain I see that www and *.domain are both displayed, with numbers from *.domain being shown by default in the mozbar. Does MozBar show *.domain numbers by default, and do I correctly understand that the (higher) www numbers displayed in page analysis for www are valid and a result of my canonical strategy?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
301 Redirect for homepage with language code
In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content. Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option. Hope folks can lend a hand here.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0