Can I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?
-
My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.
-
The problem is that our hosting platform is in a completely different programming language, if that makes sense. If we were to host another WordPress blog and want to put it on the same domain, it would have to be on another server and then load balanced, which would be a programming nightmare and consume thousands of dollars in hours of labor and other costs.
-
Yes it would, in the end you should have about the same potential on a subdomain as you have on the root domain. In the end the biggest impact that you can make is by making sure you just do great work. Write the best content and make sure at the same time that the content will get promoted. That way you should be able to beat whatever subdomain or root domain over time.
-
It would certainly be possible to market from a sub domain, but it would in my opinion be better if you could still stick to the root domain for added value.
Could you developers not install say a wordpress installation to a single directory on your root domain. e.g. /blog? Or is it already taken?
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
-
Subdomain vs Subdirectory - Specific Case: A big blog in a subdomain
Hi. First of all, I love MOZ and learned a lot about SEO by reading articles here. Thanks for all the knowledge that i received here. I read all the articles about "Subdomain vs Subdirectory" in the MOZ community and I have no doubt that subdirectories are the best option for a blog. But, the company that I work now has a blog with more than 17.000 articles, 1.000 categories and tags, hosted on a subdomain structure. The website has a Domain Authority of 78 (I am working to improve these numbers) and the blog subdomain has the same (78). We had 2.7 million hits per month in the blog and 4.5 million hits per month in the site. I am advising the company to change the blog structure to subfolders inside the domain, but I'm finding resistance to the idea, because the amount of work involved in this change is enormous and there is still the fear of losing traffic. My questions are: Is there any risk of losing traffic with the amount of articles we have? What do we probably get if we change the blog structure to subfolders? Could we have increased authority for the domain? More Traffic? How can I explain to my superiors that we would probably have increase traffic for our keywords? Is there any way to prove or test the gains from this change before we run it? Thanks in Advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus.Coelho0 -
Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
Hi there, The scenario is this: We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity. However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has. Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Can multiple geotargeting hreflang tags be set in one URL? International SEO question
Hi All, Thank you for this great post! I have a question please. If i target www.onedirect.co.nl/en/ in English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are the tags below correct? English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg: http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-be" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-lu" /> AND Targeting Holland and Belgium in Dutch: Pour la page www.onedirect.co.nl on peut inclure ce tag: http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-be" /> thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onedirect_uk0 -
Domain Forwarding for SEO
Hey guys, I recently created a new website for a client who was ranking #1 for the term "jupiter obgyn" but they have now dropped down to #4. This happened because their old home page was at www. instead of just jupiterobgyn.com. When you type in the www. version, it does take you to the root domain but it's not carrying the old PA! The www. version of the page had a 22 PA and the new root domain hosted page is a 1. How can I fix it so that "link juice" carries over? Is this something i need to do in 1and1 (their web host) or within Wordpress? Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Website Layout and SEO
Hi All, As a brand new user to Wordpress and having read articles and forum posts I have purchased Studiopress Genesis Enterprise Theme. QuestionWordpress like any traditional bespoke site can be written to incorporate variations of columns structures.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
What is the best column strategy or page layout strategy for SEO? Thanks Mark0 -
Subdomains for US Regions
The company I work for is expanding their business to new territories. I've got a lot of stabilization to do in the region/state where we're one of the most well known companies of our kind. Currently, we have 3 distinct product lines which are currently distinguished by 3 separate URLS. This is affecting the user flow of our site, so we'd like to clean it up before launching our products into the various regions. The business has decided to grow into 5 new states (one state consisting of one county only) — none of which will feature all 3 products. Our homebase state is the only one that will have all 3 products this year. My initial thought was to use subdomains to separate out the regions, that way we could use a canonical tag to stabilize the root domain (which would feature home state content, and support content for all regions), and remove us from potential duplicate content penalization. Our product content will be nearly identical across the regions for the first year. I second guessed myself by thinking that it was perhaps better to use a "[product].root/region" URL instead. And I'm currently stuck by wondering if it was not better to build out subdomains for products and regions...using one modifier or the other as a funnel/branding page into the other. For instance, user lands on "region.root.com" and sees exactly what products we offer in that region. Basically, a tailored landing page. Meanwhile the bulk of the product content would actually live under "product.root.com/region/page". My head is spinning. And while searching for similar questions I also bumped into reference of another tag meant to be used in some similar cases to mine. I feel like there's a lot of risks involved in this subdomain strategy, but I also can't help but see the benefits in the user flow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0 -
HubPages, Squidoo and subdomains
Just want to check my thinking on something. So, Google says subdomains stand on their own right? They don't get juice from the root domain. If this is true, the subdomains on a site like HubPages or WordPress.com are essentially a PR0 domain, right? Something like, mysub.hubpages.com. But if you posted an article on Squidoo, a site that doesn't use subdomains, you should get some juice from the root domain passed to your post, right? I usually go the guest blogging route, but I recently read a couple of posts on Web 2.0 link wheels swearing they are awesome, but most of the time the recommendation is to build it using what I perceive to be PR0 sites - Wordpress.com, Tumblr, HubPages subdomains. You would have to develop those sites so they have PR in order to pass juice. Am I off base here or does building a link wheel in this way seem like a waste of time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendlymachine0