Multiple Subdomains, my worst seo mistake. now what should i do?
-
Hello Everyone,
I have been running www.designzzz.com from lats 3 years now. and was doing extremely good with a PR 6 and 800K+ traffic monthly, but 6 months ago it started falling and falling badly.. now i am down to 350K total impressions :{ per month.
I have been blaming penguin for this and been talking to google reps continously over it. they assured me that my site is not under any type of manual spam etc.
Then i begin think and i realized taht was exactly the time when i launched a few subdomains as sub parts of my site like coding.designzzz.com , wordpress.designzzz.com , photograph.designzzz.com , shop.designzzz.com in the making...
now is the part that i can't undo these subdomains.. what should i do ?
my search traffic is almost killed.
I seriously need insight on this guys :
thanks in advance!
Ayaz
-
Thank you so much,
ofcourse i will do keep you updated :}
cheers
-
No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hello Devanur,
Thank you so much for the insight and pointing me to the right direction.
i did it like you said. please take a look and tell me if everything is fine.
http://coding.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/coding/
http://wordpress.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/wordpress/ ofcourse with 301s .
same goes for all other subdomains :}
I am curious how much time will it take for my traffic to start getting better?
thanks again
-
Hi Ayaz,
As you say that the sub-domains have their own original content, then please go ahead and put a 301 re-direction to the respective sub-directories on the main domain. Everything should be back to normal as per my personal experience goes. IMO, sub-domains can never be considered sub-directories by any search engine as for Google, sub-domains should be created only when the purpose of their creation is thoroughly justified with much needed diversity like a blog or a forum and/or a topic that deserves branching from that of the main domain's.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.
-
There are certain very specific circumstances where Google treats subdomains as part of the main domain for reporting purposes, Ayaz, but as far as SEO is concerned, subdomains pretty much always have to stand alone as separate sites.
Paul
-
Reverse proxy – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
That should do it for you.
-
Hello,
Thank you so much for the suggestion. as i have wordpress installations in subdomains i am not sure it will be easy to do teh redirect because of paths issues. but yeah i am gona try that.
Some people said that google now treats subdomains as subdirectories so that might not be the issue so i am confused.
About moving content from domain to subdomain , nop not really. subdomains got its own original content.
thanks again.
cheers
-
Rafi has it exactly right - as I would do it. 301 the subdomain to the appropriate page. Then make sure you resubmit a sitemap and ping all of your pages. I think you'll be fine after that. Great post Devanur Rafi.
-
Hey Ayaz,
I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.
The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/
Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.
I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.
By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Loading images below the fold? Impact on SEO
I got this from my developers. Does anyone know if this will be a SEO issue? We hope to lazy-load images below the fold where possible, to increase render speed - are you aware of any potential issues with this approach from an SEO point of view?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng1 -
Should I change the URL now?
Hi all, I have a client website that got hit in the latest algorithm update. It since appears that it had over 100 suspect links to it. I performed the Disavow procedure a few weeks ago via my Google Webmaster account, but have not received a message yet to say its been actioned. The majority of these suspect links go to one page. I am considering changing the base category (in Wordpress) to a different keyphrase and then submitting a new sitemap for indexing. This way there will be no actual link from a suspect website to a page on my website. Do you see what I mean? Will this help do you think? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | BrandC0 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
Webshop migration & SEO
Hi there I am migrating all products from my current trade website http://shop.snowbusiness.com/ to another platform. Whilst both are live, would i have to worry too much about duplicate content and no-follow the pages or is this overkill? Cheers, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
Subdomain for a blog
My client has a site hosted with a company that allows very little customization including I am unable to add a blog to the site. As he has a fair amount of time & money invested in the site, he is reluctant to start over. So my question is this. His blog is currently hosted off site, would it benefit him if I had them add a cname or a record to show his blog at blog.mydomain.com? Or does Google recognize that it is still a separate site and treat it as such? Finally does it matter how they set it up cname, a record or redirect? This is definitely not my area of expertise (if that is not already obvious from the question!). Thanks for your help! Matthew
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0 -
Multiple Region/Language Solutions
So I understand that this is a fairly broad question but I am trying to work through this on a bunch of different levels with a bunch of different sites that have multiple different issues. First I am wondering if I have an e-commerce site on a .com that is used to serve to different languages and locales around the world. Instead of a Domain.com/ES/ for a site that is supposed to serve Spain and a Domain.com/DE/ for a site that is supposed to serve Germany, we do Domain.com/en_ES/ and Domain.com/es_ES/ for an English and a Spanish version for our consumers that come from Spain. My first question is this a bad way to set this up just from a structure standpoint and my second question is what do I do about duplicate content on different locales but same languages? I am afraid that if I rel=canonical this to 1 region for each language that it may not show up in SE's for other regions but the same language. (Example Brazil and Portugal for Portuguese, Belgium and Netherlands for Dutch, Canada and France for French, Spain and Mexico for Spanish, etc...) Second do the language meta tags actually do anything or not? I am finding mixed opinions on this. Third what is the IDEAL website structure for a website that will serve multiple languages and locales from the same ccTLD? I understand this is not ideal but what is the best setup with this situation? Again I know this is a broad question but I am coming across a lot of e-commerce sites wanting help and dealing with this situation. The duplicate content thing is worrisome and I want good, localized indexing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Entry based content and SEO
My E-commerce team is implementing functionality that allows us to display different content based on what channel and even what keyword the customers used to reach our page. This is of course a move that we believe will strengthen our conversion rates, but how will this effect our organic search listings? Do you guys have any examples of how this could affect us, and are there any technology pitfalls that we absolutely need to know about?
Technical SEO | | GEMoney_No0 -
Blog on a subdomain vs subfolder?
Hi, Does anyone have data to show that a subfolder is better than a subdomain for a blog? From what I've read, it sounds like both are a viable option but you choose subdomain if you want to build your blog as a distinct entity. Do you get ranked more quickly with a subfolder? Do you see X% more lift? Has anyone tested or seen tests around this subject? Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0