Subdomain redirect
-
Hey guys,
I was thinking about creating subdomains for one of my websites. I want to divide my website in different subdomains (blog.[site].com / directory.[site].com / etc.) but I'm afraid that this will negatively impact my rankings. My blog for example has a lot of supporting content for my products and services that are primarily hosted on the homepage.
Have you guys ever created subdomains at a later stage of your website's existence? What kind of impact did you notice? Would you recommend it?
Thanks a million!
-
Jake,
This helps a lot. Thanks for your insights!
I think your last advice on rolling it our progressively is the best takeaway. I will let the community know how this works out in the end.
Kind regards,
Nizar
-
Hi Nizar,
Typically we encourage clients to consolidate subdomains onto the main site whenever possible to help consolidate authority. Subdomains are generally viewed as separate sites with regards to authority, so separating them would require each build its own independent authority.
That being said, there are often technical challenges with hosting everything on the same subdomain..e.g. Having a wordpress blog while running BigCommerce, etc.. when you have multiple platforms across different business aspects. In those cases, we just encourage clients to interlink heavily when possible with things like shared navigation, consistency in design, etc... to make sure that any opportunities for G to consider them as one and the same are met.
On the flip side, if you have sections like the forum, that may have a significant number of pages, but do not independently draw new backlinks with enough authority to contribute to overall domain authority, parsing this out can reduce the dispersion of authority on your main site (fewer pages), and eliminate crawl depth on unpopular pages.
To make the decision, I would ask myself the following:
- Do I need to do this to create a better experience for my users?
- Do these sections independently have significant authority that my main domain may lose by removing the content?
- Will may main domain continue to attract new links/citations if these sections are removed?
- Do those pages currently enjoy high rankings/traffic that contribute to specific KPIs that I wouldn't want to have negatively impacted (e.g. do forum visits often result in a product sale or service inquiry)
You could always take this effort in chunks and monitor the impacts, knowing you can roll back if needed. For example, you could move a lesser popular section such as the directory to the subdomain and watch aggregate traffic changes over the course of a couple of months and see if any negative impact occurs, and if so, if it is small enough of a drop that you could stomach on other sections.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Jake Bohall
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
-
Redirecting 301 or 302?
Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...0 -
DNS vs IIS redirection
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today1 -
Subdomain/subfolder question
Hi community, Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com? I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
404 to 301 redirects is there a limit?
Hi We've just updated our website and have binned out alot of old thin content which has no value even if re written. We have a lot of 404 error on WMT and I am in the process of doing 301 redirects on them. Is there a limit to the number of 301 the site should have?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Temporary Redirect 302 to subdomain for a couple of weeks?
Hi, To prevent DDOS attack during the Olympic Game the admins will use a service call Site Shield by Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/site_shield.html). The thing is that they will have to redirect all the trafic to a subdomain instead of the main one (http://www.website.com instead of http://website.com) and this for a couple of week (no negotiation here, it's too late and they have no choice). Does a 302 will do the job? Will I loose authority? Does adding a canonical URL on every pages of the site removing the www from the URL will help? Should I do something on webmaster tool to help? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | TVFreak0 -
Code for redirect
What is the code to redirect www.xyz.com/abc where abc is a folder to www.xyz.com/abc.html
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0 -
301 redirect .htaccess problem
Can anyone explain to me why this doesn't work? Redirect 301 /category/diamond-pendants/nstart/1/start/(.*) http://www.povada.com/category/pendants/nstart/1/start/$1 Im trying to replace everything after /start/ and insert it into the new url. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30