Onsite Search Engine
-
Hi,
We have a search engine on our website. Whenever a user searches on our site it goes to subdomain - search.mysite.com. This domain is not hosted by us, is this negatively affecting our SEO?
Does google interpret this as a bounce since a user is technically leaving our site to search for something?
Are there any other ramifications this would have on our site?
Thanks!
-
Firstly, I'm unclear as to where the subdomain lives - you say it's hosted by someone else, but then use "mysite.com" as the example. If I understand you, it's hosted by someone else, but lives on your domain - is that right?
If you don't have the same Google analytics code on the search pages, it will look like a user disappears, leaving the site, then potentially coming back. You can check this by viewing the source and looking for your GA code on any search page. This is purely a data and analytics issue, not a search optimization issue.
As far as SEO is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much about it unless the functionality of your site depends heavily on searching. You should probably block any search pages in robots.txt anyway, as for most sites they add no value. If your site works exclusively with search, you might need to find a new solution.
-
To add the domain name would help for analytics. Does it show google that users aren't leaving the site?
-
I believe if a user lands on a page on mysite.com and doesn't visit any other page on this domain, and then clicks a link to search.mysite.com, then this would count as a bounce unless you set search.mysite.com to be in the same Analytics profile.
-
I'm not so sure what you mean, are you saying that it is counted as a bounce to the site if google analytics doesn't treat this this subdomain as part of the site?
-
Yep, it is likely counted unless Google Analytics is treating the subdomain as part of your main site. If session information isn't being passed, Google would not know.
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
-
My pages are being crawled, but not indexed according to Search Console
According to Google Search Console, my pages are being crawled by not indexed. We use Shopify and about two weeks ago I selected that Traffic from all our domains redirects to our primary domain. So everything from www.url.com and https://url.com and so on, would all redirect to one url. Have added an attached image from Search Console. 6fzEQg8
Technical SEO | | HariOmHemp0 -
Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped
Fair warning, this is going to be long, but necessary to explain the situation and what has been done. I will take ANY suggestions, even if I have tried them already. We have a sister site in Australia, targeting Australian traffic. I have inherited what seems to be an incredible rat's nest. I've fixed over two dozen issues, but still haven't seemed to address the root cause. NOTE: Core landing pages have weak keyword targeting. I don't expect much here until I fix this. The main issues I'm trying to resolve first are with the unusual US-based targeting, and the inability of the homepage to rank for anything. The site is www[dot]castleford[dot]com[dot]au. Here's the rundown on what's going on: Problems: The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia. The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords. The homepage, while technically optimized on-page for "content marketing agency", and with content through MarketMuse, has historically ranked between 60-100, despite having a fairly strong DA with fairly weak competitors, based on AHREFs keyword difficulty, and Moz keyword difficulty. Oddly, the ranking has gone up to 5-7 for three day spurts over the past year. Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week). Sequence of events: November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay. November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality. January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved. May/June 2018 - added a follow inbound link sitewide to an external site that they created. 20k inbound links with same anchor text to homepage. Site has a total of 24k inbound links. July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved November 10 - I walked into this mess. What's been done: Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds). Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC. Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage. Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU" Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly. Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy. All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial. http to https redirect okay. Robots.txt updated and okay. Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU. No manual links penalty I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.
Technical SEO | | Brafton-Marketing0 -
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
Hi! The Problem We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them. The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed. Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions? Thanks for any input on this one. PmHmG
Technical SEO | | AlisonMills0 -
Google Search Console - Sitemap
Hi all, Quick question. I'm trying to update my sitemap via Google Search Console using a sitemap.xml file that I've created with ScreamingFrog. However, when trying to submit it, it seems that Google only allows sitemaps that are located at a path within your domain (i.e. www.example.com/sitemap.xml) as opposed to being able to directly upload a sitemap.xml file.Is there any way that I can easily upload my sitemap.xml file? Or is there any easy way that I can upload the file to a path on my domain so I can upload via the URL?Any insight would be much appreciated!Best,Sung
Technical SEO | | hdeg0 -
Parked domain is first in search results
We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.
Technical SEO | | Exotissimo0 -
Best Practice for Blocking a site from 1 countries search engines
A client cannot appear in any search engines in one given country but they are ok in rest of the world. Has anybody had any experience blocking a site from appearing in just google.de, bing.de and yahoo.de for example?
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
How can i get the Authors photo to show in the Google search result?
I added the rel="author" tags to the blog posts last week and updated the authors page with a link to the Google+ account, but I have yet to see the authors photo surface in the Google Results. Example URL: http://spotlight.vitals.com/2011/10/dr-richelle-cooper-testifies-against-dr-conrad-murray-in-trial/ Can anyone identify what else needs to be done?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0