Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
-
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains?
Example - our site is www.oursite.com
Dev site - development1.oursite.com
I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
-
I agree.
I have seen posts on SEOmoz and elsewhere throughout the SEO community that others are noticing drops in PR with no impact on traffic. I am not seeing a noticeable drop in traffic so the PR isn't concerning me too much but I am curious.
Have you noticed anything like this post Panda and do you think the panda update has any impact on the PR directly (I see how it would with poor content --> harder link building)? Again, I appreciate the feedback!
-
Another thought....
robots.txt shouldn't be used much but dev sites are a perfect example of where it should be used. Block crawlers from those dev sites.
-
Thank you, didn't even think of it in that sense (kind of have blinders on in this case and am looking for an easy answer, which probably doesn't exist). Appreciate the feedback!
-
Your subdomain is seen as a completely different site. Google does not assume your subdomain is related to your main site.
For example, if you visit wordpress.com you will see someone probably has the URL seo.wordpress.com. Whatever happens on that subdomain should not have any impact on any other subdomain or primary domain for wordpress.com.
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
-
Having a Subfolder/Subdirectory With a Different Design Than the Root Domain
Hi Everyone, I was wondering what Google thinks about having a subfolder/subdirectory with a different design than the root domain. So let's say we have MacroCorp Inc. which has been around for decades. MacroCorp has tens of thousands of backlinks and a couple thousand referring domains from quality sites in its industry and news sites. MacroCorp Inc. spins off one of its products into a new company called MicroCorp Inc., which makes CoolProduct. The new website for this company is CoolProduct.MacroCorp.com (a subdomain) which has very few backlinks and referring domains. To help MicroCorp rank better, both companies agree to place the MicroCorp content at MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/. The root domain (MacroCorp.com) links to the subfolder from its navigation and MicroCorp does the same, but the MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ subfolder has an entirely different design than the root domain. Will MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ be crawled, indexed, and rank better as both companies think it would? Or would Google still treat the subfolder like a subdomain or even a separate root domain in this case? Are there any studies, documentation, or links to good or bad examples of this practice? When LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, for instance, what if they kept the https://www.lynda.com/ design as is and placed it at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/. Would the pre-purchase (yellow/black design) https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ rank any worse than it does now with the root domain (LinkedIn) aligned design? Thanks! Andy
Web Design | | AndyRCWRCM1 -
Directing a domain.com/BLOG to a different host
Hello,
Web Design | | SharonEKG
i cant seem to figure out how to approach this matter. we have a website and a domain setup in one place and we wanted to setup a blog for that website on a different hosting, what do i have to do to link between the two to make it so when a user type domain com /blog he will get to our blog that is hosted on a different hosting plan? with the blog hosting plan we received a temporary domain that does not expire but i have been told that if i redirect to that temporary domain it wont work correctly also, if we do manage to go through that process will accessing the blog will the URL show domain com/blog or will still show the temporary given domain? is my only option is buying a new domain and just link between the two? Thanks!0 -
Google Translate with "no-follow" just for users' use, no ranking
Hello, I tried to search but here is a little unique situation. I would like to translate my website in 2-3 different languages not for ranking purpose, but only for some minority users within Italy to understand the content in their native language. Using "no-follow" with a Google Translate link would damage SEO? if not I would like to use it. Here are few points: Give users the ability to switch the content to their language with a link Tell Google not to follow the translated pages, because I don't want them to be used for ranking or searches I would start simply with Google Translate to see if people actually are interested, then later translate by human but still don't want google to follow I could also start with human translation instead of Google Translate if really needed, I know it is a no no. What I'm very interested is to make sure that those pages under "no-follow" won't affect my SEO in good or bad right now, because we would like to keep as it is. Thanks a lot
Web Design | | angelowei0 -
Subdomains For Real Estate Website
I am currently working on a proposal for a clients Wordpress website development which includes ongoing SEO after the website is developed. I have looked into a number of options and the one that seems the most cost effective involves using subdomains for the individual listings pages. What I want: clientsdomain.com/listings/idxnumber/ What I can get for a decent price: listings.clientsdomain.com/idxnumber/ So the majority of the website will actually exist on a subdomain because the IDX API will automatically populate pages for all of the MLS listings in the area (hundreds or thousands). Meanwhile the domain itself will have all the neighborhood pages and other optimized content, blogs and whatnot. My concern is that dividing the website like this will have negative effects on SEO. There wont be duplicate content across subdomain and main domain, but they will share a lot of links back and forth. I haven't found any recent sources on the topic. Almost everything I have found says that dividing a website in this manor is bad for SEO, but these articles are often many years old. Does anyone know of a Wordpress plugin/IDX company that can provide a solution that doesn't use a subdomain and actually just lists each MLS page within a directory? I am open to using another platform, I am just most familiar with Wordpress. Will using a subdomain in the ways mentioned above have a profound negative effect on SEO? Thank you for your time in responding, I greatly appreciate it.
Web Design | | TotalMarketExposure0 -
Internal links, new pages & Domain Authority
I have two questions regarding Domain Authority: 1. Is it possible that a drop in Domain Authority may have been caused by adding a blog and blog posts? In other words, would adding pages/posts dilute the site's authority? And will it catch back up with itself or will that require inbound links to those new pages? (oops! that was 3 questions in one) 2. Would it be detrimental to have internal links coming from blog posts without authority to my Home page and could that have contributed to a drop in Domain Authority? Thanks!
Web Design | | gfiedel0 -
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
Web Design | | jaychow0 -
Entering different but related industry, keep it on the same domain or new domain?
We rank well across many online furniture keywords within google.ie here in Ireland, this is our core business and it is successful. Now we want to branch out into the related field of "kitchens". So the question is do we setup a new domain (a sister site) or keep it on the same domain with a new sub category. So the main categories off the home page would be: Sofas Bedroom Furniture Dining Furniture Kitchens I know all the benefits of keeping to the one domain (the domain has age, and already has DA of 30 with many landing pages with PA from 30 to 49), so for the short term SEO angle keep it on the same domain. But from a Branding perspective this is not a great approach. Is it better to have a dedicated domain/site for kitchens (and the bonus of having a keyword match in the domain)? We are always thinking longer term so we see this as a 3 year plan outwards rather than a get rich quick. There is an additional overhead of course with managment of the domain, templates SSL, PCI etc etc and we are conscious that a new domain is not a easy route to success. Looking at the top 10 for the main keywords within the "kitchen" keyword cloud most if not all are dedicated kitchen sites, or kitchens are the main business so their homepage is there kitchens landing page. The competition in the google.ie space have 20-30 DA and PAs roughly 30 being the highest DA, we are thinking that this has not a huge challenge to overcome? Thanks for any help, assistance or comments really appreciated. Ware regards, Eunan @ Love Furniture
Web Design | | eunaneunan0