What should I consider before setting up a sub domain?
-
Morning all!
We've just been approached by IT. They've been asked to develop an online 'portal' where clients can upload and download materials.
IT will be developing a portal that sits on the company network perimeter (hosted on our internal servers). The concept is that 3<sup>rd</sup> parties can get and update information in regards to progressing cases, the first use will be for agencies who will retrieve records via the portal and then post reports after a consultation.
however I would like to have an automatic link to forward to the portal from the web address: oursite.com/dave
We will look to create robot.txt and anything else to prevent from listings/indexes.
Does any of the above mess with your SEO?
The Directors have asked if they can have this on a sub-domain of our site.
Is this wise? And, are there any major SEO considerations for my team to worry about?
Better still, have any of you had to deal with this before? If so, what happened?
All the best,
John
-
Subdomains are seperate from your root domain SEO. I guess that you do not want search engines to discover the new site?
Deploy a noindex tag on the site to make sure that it is not indexed in the search engines. However, if you place it in a subfolder on your site (e.g. domain.com/site/) I will affect the overall impression of the site from a search engines perspective.
You could take a look at the Moz guide about domains (it could help you understand the difference in subdomains and root domains in respect to SEO): http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain
-
So far as i can see, you should have no problem with this.
It looks like they want to hide the subdomain from indexes so as long as robots.txt. is properly configured, you should have no issue at all.
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
-
Lost ranking after domain switch
I recently migrated from https://whitefusemedia.com to https://whitefuse.com. The website URL structure and content remained the same and I followed all the best practice guidance regarding checks on the new domain and appropriate 301 redirects. I have seen traffic drop by about 50% and the traffic that is still coming through is mainly coming through links still listed by Google under the old domain (https://whitefusemedia.com). Is this normal? Should I expect to see this bounce back, or is there anything I can do now to regain the rankings?
Technical SEO | | wfm-uk0 -
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Questions on switching domain name of my site
Hey guys, I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with. But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one. Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence. The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to? As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process. Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant. Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | deathbyseo0 -
How do we maintain keyword rankings when creating a domain?
We are creating a new corporate "marketing site" on Hubspot and connecting our existing product site to that as a sub-domain. Our existing site ranks very well for all of our targeted keywords. The existing product site will now be behind a login, so how do we transfer juice to the new site in Hubspot? Or can we?
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Are .clinic domains effective?
We acquired a .clinic domain for a client, they are right now running under a .ca and I was just wondering if there were any cons to making the switch. On the flip side are there any pros? I've tried to search for the answer but couldn't seem to come across anything, thank you if you have any knowledge or could point me to a resource.
Technical SEO | | webignite0 -
How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Specific Domain Migration Question
My company will be taking over an ecommerce site that is built to get local city/state traffic where the competition is slim to none for the given keyword. This site gets 2500+ visits per day, and we're looking to maintain and eventually grow that traffic. We would like to move that site onto our ecommerce platform which will force URL change and of every 'keyword' city/state page on the site. We're undecided whether to keep it on an unfamiliar platform that already gets traffic or to move it and possibly face the 404's or weeks of redirecting a single keyword-city/state page to another. Any advice or insight would be great!
Technical SEO | | BMac540 -
Domain tld question
Hi all, I have a question regarding the ranking of exact match tld which is co.uk Currently I have a .com domain with PR of 3 and the problem is that it have one word in front of my desired keyword, so it's not exact match. I have managed to buy an exact match but it's co.uk The questions are: Will a co.uk rank better for UK than .com domain I am reading at SEOMOZ that exact match domain value is getting lower, so is it worth to redirect my current .com domain to co.uk just to get rid of that one word and start all over again with exact match. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0