Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
-
Hello,
I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains.
We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org.
As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these?
I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore.
Many thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for replying Will.
You have mentioned a few ways to deal with this there - and they all seem to point out to the fact that this should not really be a high-priority issue for us at the moment. Especially, if you think that sub-domains do not really have a major effect to the main site (I would not even think it's even worth us deindexing to be honest as it may be relevant to some people and we can just allow Google to continue indexing as it is).
Surely, all considerations point to this: we can come to the conclusion that we won't be doing any SEO-related work on these pages.
Therefore, how do I set up MOZ to ignore these two sub-domains and only show crawl errors related to the main site? We just don't want these pages to be crawled at all by MOZ given we won't do any work on them.
Thanks
-
Hi there. Sorry for the slow follow-up on this - there was an issue that meant I didn't get the email alert when it was assigned to me.
There is increasing evidence that culling old / poor performing content from your site can have a positive effect, though I wouldn't be particularly confident that this would transfer across sub-domains to benefit the main site.
In general, I suspect that most effort expended here will be better-placed elsewhere, and so I would angle towards the least effort option.
I think that the "rightest" long-term answer though would be to move the best content to the main domain (with accompanying 301 redirects) and remove the remainder with 410 status codes. This should enable you to focus on the most valuable content and get the most benefit from the stuff that is valuable, while avoiding having to continue expending effort on the stuff that is no longer useful. The harder this is, though, the less I'd be inclined to do it - and would be more likely to consider just deindexing the lowest quality stuff and getting whatever benefit remains from the better content for as long as it is a net positive, with an eye to eventually removing it all.
Hope that helps - I don't think it's a super clear-cut situation unfortunately.
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
-
What is the proper URL length? in seo
i learned that having 50 to 60 words in a url is ok and having less words is preferable by google. but i would like to know that as i am gonna include keywords in the urls and i am afraid it will increase the length. is it gonna slighlty gonna hurt me? my competitors have 8 characters domain url and keywords length of 13 and my site has 15 character domain url and keywords length of 13 which one will be prefered by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Can I 301 redirect old URLs to staging URLs (ex. staging.newdomain.com) for testing?
I will temporarily remove a few pages from my old website and redirect them to a new domain but in staging domain. Once the redirection is successful, I will remove the redirection rules in my .htaccess and get the removed pages back to live. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Asynchronous loading of product prices bad for SEO?
We are currently looking into improving our TTFB on our ecommerce site. A huge improvement would be to asynchronously load the product prices on the product list pages. The product detail page – on which the product is ordered- will be left untouched. The idea is that all content like product data, images and other static content is sent to the browser first(first byte). The product prices depend on a set of user variables like delivery location, vat inclusive/exclusive,… etc. So they would requested via an ajax call to reduce the TTFB. My question is whether google considers this as black hat SEO or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jef22200 -
Would having a + plus sign between keywords in meta title have an effect on SEO?
I have seen one of my clients' competitors do this in their meta title and it got me a little intrigued... I understand that google uses the + sign as an operator in adwords, and to a certain extent, as a search tool, but would it help or make any difference to the SEO in the meta title/data (eg. 'SEO+Marketing+Services')? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LexisClick10 -
Subdomains vs. Subfolders Wordpress Multisite
I am in the process redesigning my organization's website using wordpress multisite. I am currently planning on creating subdomains for each of the locations, as I thought that having a keyword saturated domain name would provide the best rankings. So the Omaha office would look like this: omaha.example.com Would it be better to go with example.com/omaha? Things to consider: Google adwords is currently a huge source of our traffic. Despite having very good organic rankings, we receive most of our traffic from pay-per-click sources. The "display URL" has dramatic effect on our CTR, so I want to avoid subfolders if possible. (example OmahaEmergencyDental.com receives far more click thru's than EmergencyDental.com) Each location currently has it's own domain and website (omahaemergencydental.com) these sites/pages have been in place for several years Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LoganYard0 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860 -
Separate domain name for a subdomain?
I just created a subdomain to help our main TLD website. I was wondering if it's smart to create a separate TLD for this subdomain and set up a forward and build links to it. Reason I was thinking about it because it would be easier for people to remember instead of typing in subdomain.maindomain.com. But, I don't want the main website to suffer, since the purpose of creating this subdomain and it's content is to help the main domain. Any inputs on this? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FinanceSite0