Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
-
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
-
So there were no external links pointing to the subdomain admin.site.com ? If that's the case you could probably just noindex/nofollow the thing or let it 404. You could write an .htaccess rule to rewrite the domain name, but it's actually probably not worth it now that I think about it. The exception, of course, is if the subdomain had external links pointed to it.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure how feasible it is to redirect all of those urls. I know I could use regex but I just terminated the server that admin.site.com lived on so I can't access a robots.txt file anymore. Could I simply do a generic redirect admin.site.com -> site.com?
The subdomain was the same site and domain.
Thanks.
-
Okay, so the situation here is a little unclear, but the solution should be pretty straightforward.
If the admin.site.com was different from the original site domain, simply noindex/nofollow all of the pages on that domain. I recommend this over a robots.txt rule because it will actually remove them from the index. You can add a disallow all rule in robots.txt later once the site is completely noindexed.
If the admin.site.com was the same domain, I'd recommend redirecting all of those pages to the new URLs again and then launching a noindex/nofollow version blocked with robots.txt, though I'm not sure why it needs to exist for reference. If the subdomain was different from the old site you could also probably just noindex/nofollow all of it without the redirect. It's not best practice, but it's not that big a deal.
Hope this helps to answer.
-
If you took website down, you don't have to really do anything. Go to search console, do fetch as google on old admin subdomain, so google understands that it's not there anymore, and then just wait. Google will take those backlinks down.
-
The other thing I should note is that these site links do not show in Google when searching for the topic. I'm only seeing reported back links because the admin.site.com subdomain was blocked from Google crawling it for search results. Not sure if that makes a difference.
-
It says I can only demote 100 links, I need to demote upwards of 40,000 since the admin.site.com basically mirrored the actual site.
Now I'm a little confused.
I took the old site down, so I can use a robots.txt file there anymore.
So how can I disallow the entire admin subdomain and stop reporting back links?
-
I see. Read my response below and just use meta robots. it will help you out.
If you want to deindex those backlinks, you also can look into Google Search Console's demoting tool, but i don't think it's necessary.
-
Don't do that, disallow in robots.txt will NOT resolve indexing issue! What you need to use is meta robots. Noindex, nofollow. Watch this WBF on this subject:
-
Thanks
-
Hi there. Thanks for your response.
The pages exist on the new site, but the subdomain should have never been indexed. I noticed the back links in Google Console initially then confirmed with SEO Power Suite.
Basically we had site.com, then created a brand new site and migrated content over to newsite.com with 301 redirects from the old site. Then we wanted to keep the old site up for reference so we put it at admin.site.com. That is where all the 40,000 back links were coming from, admin.site.com, the old site.
There is no reason for us to redirect admin.site.com since the original articles were properly redirected. I guess however some how when the old site was taken down, Google must have indexed it still at the subdomain and counted those as backlinks.
-
Just make sure you add a robots.txt to the subdomain with
User-agent: * Disallow: / Or if the old site is not needed anymore, redirect the subdomain to your main domain and remove the site.
-
Hi there.
So, all the pages, from which those backlinks are coming from are non-existent anymore? have they been redirected? do they return 404s? Also, how did you find them? in Google Search Console or another tool?
So, if you found it in Google Search Console, and the original pages indeed have been removed and properly redirected, then it's just time delay by GSC. Otherwise (if those pages are crawlable), you should fix it.
Hope this makes sense.
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
-
Would you get a backlink from a site that doesn't have many ranking keywords?
I been seeing some sites that have 0 ranking keywords but a DA 40 and 0% spam score, would you guys get a link from one of these sites?
Link Building | | arango200 -
Looking for a small list of sites I can gain backlinks from
Is there or does anyone have a list of backlinks I can guest post etc from in order to gain some good strong backlinks?
Link Building | | infinety0 -
Domain and page backlinks
Hello Everyone, I am new at SEO, and I am a bit confused with the following situation: I have domain, wordpress site on it, and I am building backlinks to it (testing). I do not have "home" page among pages in wordpress, if it means anything. When I build links, i use different anchor texts, but they all point to http://somethingsomething.net -Ahrefs shows that I have 830 backlinks from 45 domains, to my URL, which is http://somethingsomething.net (it is also my site's home page address) -MOZ;s Open site explorer, on the other hand, shows the following: 8 internal links and 0 external links for page specific metrics, and 878 total links 0 external for root domain metrics. -Google Webmaster tools shows 10 external links pointing to my site Please can someone explain to me what is happening here? Thanks a lot
Link Building | | ShivFriv770 -
How can I find page 1 google keyword rankings for a certain page?
Not sure if someone has a tool for this yet or not... Say I have a page like this: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Spokane.Painting.Pros.509-210-2799 and I would like to find out what keywords this page ranks for on google. Is there any tool that I can paste in that link and it would give me keywords that it ranks well for? Other than the SEO moz rank checker. It's not like I want to run a campaign just for links like that but I might want to build some links to citations like that so I can move those citations up in the rankings.
Link Building | | Superflys0 -
Not sure which url to use for backlinks
Hi our site, northamericahvac.com automatically goes to http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront. There isnt anything I can do about it though, because we use prostores which limits things for us. That leads me to ask, when I'm making backlinks would I use northamericahvac.com www.northamericahvac,com, or http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront.
Link Building | | ithvac0 -
Manual action and no ranking impact?
Hello, I received the message in Google Webmasters Tools about unnatural links to site (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFHCw4Q_FQ) for two of my websites. I have a hard time undestanding why since I don't buy links, I don't do link exchanges and I don't directories or article directories. Anyways, I received this message on Friday and I didn't lose any rankings on either of those sites or at least not on my main keyword which is the only one that matters. Is it normal that I didn't lose any rankings? Would you advise I do anything specific? Thanks a lot.
Link Building | | EndeR-0 -
Subdomains vs Subfolders
I've had a good read on this one and just wondered whether the info on the below link is still valid 3 years on: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites My main site is a forum but I want to add further content in the form of a blog. It seems logical to me that domain.com/blog/ would make more sense than blog.domain.com as the the content and inbound links to the blog would also help the forum where it's on the same subdomain, however I just wanted to make sure that was still the case as I've also read that Google now see a subdomain and subfolder in the same way if set up correctly in webmaster tools and this solution would look neater if that was the case. Thanks all.
Link Building | | Optimise0 -
Can PR0 backlinks be harmful?
Having a discussion on someone with whether or not PR0 backlinks can be harmful. Managed to find these blog posts that support my argument; http://geoland.org/2011/02/can-bad-links-hurt-your-google-rankings/ http://www.johnmcelborough.com/bad-links-good-site My argument: Things like article spinning and distribution are pretty much pointless. I used UniqueArticleWizard for a while when I first started out with SEO. It gave me around 1000 PR0 backlinks. A few weeks later my site was penalised from PR5 to PR2. Thanks
Link Building | | craven220