Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
-
Hi,
A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com.
If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain?
Many thanks!
Dan
-
I disagree, actually: one thing I have learned from my friends outside of our online or development world is that most people see URLs as a vaguely incomprehensible string that they copy exactly. There is a tendency to add "www" if there isn't one to the beginning of a URL, but generally visitors are just going to copy and paste whatever is in their address bar when sharing.
So, I would just make sure that any "www"s are 301 redirected to their non "www" version of the URL.
Good luck!
-
Dan,
Just a thought for natural incoming links:
As a user (taking my SEO glasses off for a moment), if I did like the site - and know nothing of the importance of links, aka.. the everyday users, I would probably link to domain.com and not subdomain.domain.com - unless I came directly off a blog article...
That may be what the company wants: for users to link to the training application (not really sure)? It seems as if they have the www. redirecting to subdomain (so all www.domain.com links would actually hit the subdomain) but everything else would steer clear of the domain.
Hope this helps,
Eli
-
There's no penalty for running a website on the subdomain. That's perfectly fine but all the redirecting might be confusing for regular users. The most important part for any website is to make it simple for the end-user. If it's simple for the user, Google won't have a problem with what you're doing. You'll also want to take a look at any backlinks. In terms of SEO, Google will pass a tiny bit of juice but for the most part, they treat a subdomain as a completely different site from the root domain. www.xyz.com is not the same site as subdomain.xyz.com, and both domains will need to be individually handled. They can work together but your backlinks will be split between the 2.
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
How long until I see an SEO impact from newly optimized site
We just recently launched a new version of our website. This new version allowed us to integrate research into technical SEO updates to enhance our search visibility. Based on experience from those viewing this post, what is a good average timeframe in which I should start seeing some effects from these changes in Google? I know this question is hard to answer because of all the variables that are part of the answer but I need something to take to the c-level as an estimate of what to expect. I figured experience might tell a good story here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Same brand but different domains and TLDs, What could be affect on SEO?
I am not sure, if i have a valid question to ask, but i am a bit stuck.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mustansar
We just got a campaign from one client. Its automotive brand offering the same (classified) services to buy and sell used car on their sites. The issue is the have different domains, which is obvious based on which country they are however issue is those domains are not consistent match as a brand. ie www.mtmotorslab.co.uk
www.mtmotors.co.za
www.motortrader.com.pk
www.motortrader.in
www.mtmotors.com.au my question is here, how could it impact our seo efforts or any such effort to establish a strong brand with this sort situation of different tld as well as different domain under same umbrella. Many Thanks0 -
How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?
Hi all, The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously): olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects. As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes1 -
New Domain name vs Low Ranked Existing Site
I am going to build a new site. I could hang it off an existing site with similar content or buy a new keyword rich domain and start over. The existing site does not have much trust or authority beyond the domain being registered for 5 plus years. I would prefer to start over and build linksfrom scratch but I realize we are starting at the bottom. The keywords we will be competing against are not super competetive so I think we can get ranking within 6 months or so. These post Panda days I am rethinking everything so any input is appreciated. I did a similar niche site a few years ago and found the site ranked well fairly quickly for its little nice. Today though it may be different. I have no experience in buying domains and would have no idea where to start there. New or existing? Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Sub-domain and Sub-directory - Is there no difference
Hi, Last year Google announced that it will treat links from a sub-domain as internal links and not external - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html. Does it means that now there is no difference between a sub-domain and a sub-directory and anyone of them can be used? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Multiple country site versions and hosting
If I intend to have 5 versions of an e-commerce site, one for each countries marketplace, would it be best to: a) Host each site in its own country b) Host all sites from 1 server/1 country I'm presuming that hosting in each country is better? But how quantifiable is this, and is it worth the extra hosting and management costs? Any advice gratefully received..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0