No Control Over Subdomains - What Will the Effect Be?
-
Hello all,
I work for a university and I my small team is responsible for the digital marketing, website, etc. We recently had a big initiative on SEO and generating traffic to our website.
The issue I am having is that my department only "owns" the www subdomain. There are lots of other subdomains out there. For example, a specific department can have its own subdomain at department.domain.com and students can have their own webpage at students.domain.com, etc.
I know the possibilities of domain cannibilization, but has any one run into long term problems with a similar situation or had success in altering the views of a large organization?
If I do get the opportunity to help some of these other domains, what is best to help our overall domain authority? Should the focus be on removing similar content to the www subdomain or cleaning up errors? Some of these subdomains have hundreds of 4XX errors.
-
Thank you for that reply. As you mentioned, I think I am more struggling with my task and that unified mission across all subdomains in an industry where only a handful of institutions can make that happen.
There was lots of good information to take from this. Thank you.
-
It all depends upon how intensely these domains and sub-domains are networked together. If they're very strongly interlinked, Google will likely consider them to be a single website. That brings benefits such as the pooling of SEO authority, but also weaknesses such as the transference or spread of Google penalties. That being said, if one sub domain really doesn't have their sh*t together but other departments have created genuinely useful resources, Google will be loathe to impact useful pages just because 'someone else in the same family' doesn't really know what they're doing.
The largest problem will be lack of vision and operating within the confines of an organisation where, people all have different ideas instead of letting data do the talking. All decisions should be data-led. If the data says, this area of your site is the most important and it also has the biggest opportunities - all efforts should be focused there. If you fundamentally lack the ability to direct all of the things which impact marketing (content, UX, CRO, SEO, design) across all sub-domains with one unified vision, you'll always be limited in terms of the gains you can make. On the other hand within such an organisation, that may be well understood and respected (thus alleviating some tensions)
Domain authority does not come from you, your resources or anything that your organisation does. Authority is a reflection of how popular and useful, the rest of the web finds your websites, pages, resources and content. Editorial (not advertorial or ad-based) links to your live pages from recent, authoritative sources garner your domain (and pages) additional authority. What you're struggling against is the shell of academic culture. It's a sector where, if people do X and teach Y they earn Z. They are happy to be institutionalised (sorry if that offends anyone but it's true) so they seldom consider the impact which the views of others have upon their success
I remember I had a debate with a uni tutor once who got on my case because I complained about their attendance (in terms of being a lecturer). They said academia is not a business and that I shouldn't hold it as a service I was paying for. Further down the line I was unable to finish an essay within the specified time limit and was told "well in the future, when you are employed - your employer will expect you to be able to cut to the chase. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge isn't worth anything" - **small wonder **I went ballistic at the double-standards which had been put across to me
The point is, your organisation's authority isn't determined (in SEO or real-life terms) by their arbitrary academic choices. It's determined by performance, and how useful people find the specified website or organisation. Everyone in life asks "what's the ROI on that?" - especially since tuition fees are pretty high in the USA and creeping up in the UK too
When you get good, non-manipulative, editorial links from external sources (of high relevance and repute), which Google doesn't think have been produced 'for SEO alone' - your SEO authority grows larger. With more authority in a given area, you have more power to rank (as long as errors and crawl barrier don't inhibit that authority from cascading down to the relevant sub-pages). Removing roadblocks like errors, could make you rank much better. But if your authority is low, it'll do jack diddly squat
You need to engage your organisation from a more PR-esque perspective, then when you have built up some good links - tackle the errors much more aggressively. That's my 2pence anyway
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
-
New Subdomain & Best Way To Index
We have an ecommerce site, we'll say at https://example.com. We have created a series of brand new landing pages, mainly for PPC and Social at https://sub.example.com, but would also like for these to get indexed. These are built on Unbounce so there is an easy option to simply uncheck the box that says "block page from search engines", however I am trying to speed up this process but also do this the best/correct way. I've read a lot about how we should build landing pages as a sub-directory, but one of the main issues we are dealing with is long page load time on https://example.com, so I wanted a kind of fresh start. I was thinking a potential solution to index these quickly/correctly was to make a redirect such as https://example.com/forward-1 -> https:sub.example.com/forward-1 then submit https://example.com/forward-1 to Search Console but I am not sure if that will even work. Another possible solution was to put some of the subdomain links accessed on the root domain say right on the pages or in the navigation. Also, will I definitely be hurt by 'starting over' with a new website? Even though my MozBar on my subdomain https://sub.example.com has the same domain authority (DA) as the root domain https://example.com? Recommendations and steps to be taken are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markbwc0 -
Adding Video to Landing Pages-Beneficial SEO Effect in Terms of Links & Visitor Engagement?
I run a New York City commercial real estate in New York City. Lately, I have started to produce 30-second videos about property listings and neighborhoods. I have noticed that the engagement for these videos on Facebook is much higher that for text posts. Should adding these videos on our website (hosting them on Youtube) result in increased visitor engagement? Could there be a positive SEO effect such as more links and higher quality links? Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Subdomain vs totally new domain
Problem: Our organization publish maps for public viewing using google maps. We are currently getting limited value from these links. We need to separate our public and private maps for infrastructure purposes, and are weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of separating by domain or sub domain with regards SEO and infrastructure. Current situation: maps.mycompany.com currently has a page authority of 30 and mycompany.com has a domain authority of 39. We are currently only getting links from 8 maps which are shared via social media whereas most people embed our maps on their website using an iframe which I believe doesn't do us any favour with SEO. We currently have approx 3K public maps. Question: What SEO impact can you see if we move our public maps from the subdomain maps.mycompany.com to mycompanypublicmaps.com? Thanks in advance for your help and happy to give more info if you need it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eSpatial0 -
Is there a problems with putting encoding into the subdomain of a URL?
We are looking at changing our URL structure for tracking various affiliates from: https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx to https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ Both would allow us to track affiliates, but the second would allow us to use cookies to track. Does anyone know if this could possibly cause SEO concerns? Also, For the site we want to rank for, we will use a reverse proxy to change the URL from https://aff_xxx.maindomain.com/quote/ to https://www.maindomain.com/quote/ would that cause any SEO issues. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Why does Moz recommend subdomains for language-specific websites?
In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Will Google read my page title and H1?
Dim strTitle : strTitle = "The Title Of My Page" <title>Company name - <%=strTitle%></title> <%=strTitle%> Will Google be able to read this? When I view source the relevant information is in the tags but I'm wondering if Google hates this or not? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
CMS generating thousands of links, will it hurt my SEO?
I've shifted my static (HTML) eCommerce website to Magento. I am facing serious problem, my website has total 20 products (each product has canonical URL) , I was surprised to see thousands of links indexed in Google as well as in my webmaster Crawler stats, later on I removed all from webmaster tool and marked as fixed, also blocked crawlers to crawl on those specific directories through robots.txt file. Now my question is will these urls still effect my website's SEO? As they still exist and accessible but blocked for crawlers. And is there any better way to block them other than robots.txt.Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarybusinessmachines0 -
Should I change site link structure? Will that make things worse?
I've got an Exact Match Domain that has just started to do well in Google for say the past year. I've always received good rankings from Bing and Yahoo but I love the traffic levels that Google sends. Long story short on the 25th according to webmaster tools, my impressions on their search engine have been destroyed. No problems, not de-indexed, just not showing my site anymore. I like this site and have been careful, built some links and the anchor text is suspect but also not suspect because its the same as the domain. What I feel the problem may be is the site structure. I set it up a long time ago like this: Exact-Match-keyword. com/ Exact-match-keyword.php/state I thought it looked kinda spammy at the time but also thought it may help. Now I'm wondering if I shorten all the page titles to the state name and 301 the old links if I will regain rankings, or if I may lose some from other search engines. I used to think Penguins were cute......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TEGS1