Subdomained White-Label Sites
-
Wanted to pass along a specific use-case that I'm thinking through in the technical setup for a client.
Site: http://www.abc.com is an ecommerce company that offers the ability to white-label a site so an affiliate can join and get access to the site, and ultimately get a cut of whatever is sold through that affiliate.
So I join the site and get access to scott.xyz.com and can handle my business through that. From a technical standpoint, this is the proposed technical setup of the site.
- Canonical URLS will be set to www.xyz.com
- Pages on scott.xyz.com will be set to noindex, while the main www.xyz.com will be set to be indexed
- Webmaster Tools for scott.xyz.com will be set to have preferred domain of www.xyz.com
- scott.xyz.com will have separate robots.txt instructing to block crawl
Questions
- Am I missing any steps in properly setting up the technical background of the subdomain sites? The use of subdomains isn't something that I am able to move away from.
- Will any links in to scott.xyz.com pass juice and authority to www.xyz.com, or does the noindex/nocrawl block that from happening?
- Is there anything else that I am missing?
Thanks!
Scott -
Hi Scott,
1. That looks good to me! An additional factor you'd want to consider is how you're treating visits from the subdomains to the main site, and vice versa, in analytics - do you want those to be treated as referrals, or as part of the same session? - and configure accordingly.
2. If you've marked the subdomains "noindex, follow" Google will likely pass some link juice, but as usual in Moz Q&A the answer is "it depends" In this case, it depends on whether or not Google crawls the pages on the subdomain in the first place, and how closely-related Google perceives the subdomains to be to the main domain. So the answer is "some, probably, but probably not as much as links from unrelated sites that aren't noindexed."
3. From your question, it sounds like you're pretty familiar with the subdomains-vs-subfolders conversation in SEO, so I won't go into it here. Again, you're going to want to be really intentional when it comes to tracking on these sites to make sure you're properly tracking traffic between them.
This sounds like it could make a really interesting blog post once you've got it all set up!
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
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Article section on site or blog?
So, I've just started using MOZ since I've decided I wanna be an "expert" in SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
I run a couple of successful websites in Denmark and I've had some SEO guy do some SEO a few years back, but now I wanna learn this myself. I've already read a lot of books, blogs on the subject and talked with several SEO "experts". Anyways, I have a concrete "problem" which I need some help on deciding what to do. Its the same issue / dilemma on all my sites. Dilemma
On my site i have a menu-section called Articles and tips. As the name implies it's basically articles and tips on subjects related to the site.
The articles are both informal for the users and I also use these to attract new users on specific keywords.
The articles are not "spam" articles or quickly made articles, the actually give good information to the users and are wellwritten and so. I've hired a girl to create more articles, so there will be a good flow on articles, interviews and so on soon. Some SEO guys tells me, that I should create and use a external blog "instead" and post the articles there instead of on my site. (ex www.newsiteblog.com) And another SEO guy tells me that I should run a blog on my own site (ex www.ownsite.com/blog) , where I post the articles. I have a really hard time deciding what is the best way, since I hear all kinds of ideas, and really dont know who to trust. My own idea is, that it seems "stupid" to take content from the site and put on external blog.
Then I would also have to create a new blog, and point links from that to my site and so. Any of you guys have any ideas? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?
I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information. All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain. Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen. Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy): href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143" I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO. Any advice?? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
In mobile searches, does Google recognize HTML5 sites as mobile sites?
Does Google recognize HTML5 sites using responsive design as mobile sites? I know that for mobile searches, Google promotes results on mobile sites. I'm trying to determine if my site, created in HTML5 with responsive design falls into that category. Any insights on the topic would be very helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Google is not Indicating any Links to my site
We built a new store on another ccTLD and linked to it from some of our other domains in a few locations. I am noticing that with the Google operator command "links:" we are seeing nothing linking to our site anywhere. Some things to clarify: These are not no-follow links These pages linking to our new domain are indexed The pages being linked to on our new domain are indexed This is not a flash site or heavy in JavaScript The links existed the day the site was launched so when the new pages were crawled they existed. "Site:" command in Google shows me that my new site is indexed. What could potentially be causing this? I am trying to get these newer ccTLD's to begin ranking and I understand that I need to get links going to these pages since they are fairly new (2.5 months) so I can outrank the .com in the SE's in those locales. (Like Google.co.uk)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0