Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
-
Background:
We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt).
Question:
Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
-
IMO it is more about ease of use for the end user and less about SEO. If you have a good help sub-domain, it will automatically redirect users to the product site.
Still If I had to make a decision, I would have compared metrics like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate of help site and main site. If help metrics are better than the main site, adding content to main will add value else it will deplete value. Also if it is only one product, it makes sense to have help within main site bur for multiple products, you should be better off with sub domains (product wise and not docs vs main).
Please see and decide what is best for your users first, keeping SEO at second priority. Hope it helps.
- Nitin
-
I really like Jason's response and I watched the video. Still, from sheer gut instinct, I would move those docs to the main domain. Call me crazy, it's just seems like the right thing to do.
-
The debate about subdomains vs. subdirectories has been going on for a long time. You have to be careful about reading old stuff, because the best answer has changed over time based on changes to search algorithms.
I.E. There was a time when "link-juice" was treated separately on each sub-domain, so subdomains could dilute your effort. There was also an era, when Google would allow a max of two results per sub-domain on a SERP, and so people would use multiple sub-domains to get the potential for more links on a SERP.
At the moment, they appear to be roughly equivalent And so the decision usually comes down to other convenience issues rather than SEO benefit In your case, since you're already on a sub-domain I probably wouldn't bother to move them and do all the re-directs, ect...
I'm basing this advice, largely on Matt Cutts video answer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk
-
Yea, Sean
I agree that you should move it under the main website. I am not an expert at this but I can definitely see how it can potentially dilute your juice from the main website. It almost seems like it should be on the resources page. I see how you guys have " Showcase| Case Studies| Hosting| ..." I would stick it between " Case Studies" and " Hosting."
What was the rationale behind putting it on a different domain?
-
Hi Sean,
My gut reaction is "Heck Yes!" I would move the documentation, but perhaps, if you can convert it to .pdf file types, so you can embed a link back to your relevant page or main website from inside the document. This will also keep a link in the document if someone decides to share it off site somewhere, making for some handy links back to your site.
Interested to know what others think!
Dana
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
-
Help to decide of domain move reversal after 5 months!
Hello, first sorry for my bad english,it isn't my first lanugage.
Technical SEO | | Milad25
I have a website with 13 years of history and activity. 5 Months ago we received an warning message from our domain provider which would seize our domain because of sanctions (i live in Iran), and they have seized many of iranian domains since then, therefore i have decided to quickly change my domain to another address so i could save my website as much as possible before they take out my domain...
I have moved my website successfully to a new domain address and have done everything necessary for a good domain move (301 all links, change template and...) I have also used the "Change of Address Tool" provided in google search console so google knows my new domain address and change all of my links...
Unfortunately 90% of my traffics comes from google, therefore we are hevaily depending on organic traffic.
Since i have changed my domain address my traffic has been declining, and now i have only 30% of the traffic input left from google compared to my old domain 5 months ago. (i had recently some SEO troubles too which could effect this decline even more)
Fortunately my old domain wasn't seized by the domain provider and i have successfully transfered it to another provide recently so there is no danger for my old domain anymore.
My question is, should i move my website back to my old domain (cancel the google "Change of Address Tool" and use it again to move the new domain back to the old domain)? My old domain has more than 13 Years of history,has many backlinks within this 13years, and till now, i cannot get good rankings with new posts on the new domain, sometimes google even does not index my new articles several days, but my old domain ranks still well (i have tested a new article on the old domain to see how it performs and it was not very good, but i think it ranks still better than my new domain).
My top pages and categories has been redirected successful and are still ranking well on google on the new domain address and hasn't been affected negativly, my main problem are new posts that are not ranking well o even does not get indexed for several days!
I don't know what to do now, are 5months not enough for google to completly transfer all domain scores from my old domain to the new one? Will all scores of my old domain even transfer to my old domain eventually? How about the many Backlinks i have pointed to the old domain? (which 90% i cannot change or ask to change to my new address) Will the backlinks scores pointing to the old domain transfer to the new domain?In other hand i fear to move my site back to the old domain because i don't know how google would behave, would all my seo score and rankings come back after i move back to the old domain? Also as far as i know, after 6months of using the google "Change of Address Tool" i cannot cancle the domain change anymore, therefore i have roughly 1 month to decide to cancle the move or not...
Please if anyone could help or guide me what to do it would be life saving for me, because my whole income and my family depends on my website... 😞0 -
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Old documents online as link juice
Each month I upload my auction catalog in different formats (word, pdf and rtf). I have about 9 years of catalogues online that have all been indexed by Google. In each catalog there is a link to my terms and conditions page (which has made the page authority for that page quite high in some unusual, but desired keywords), there is also many, many mentions of non-desired keywords in each of those documents and links to my domain. Is it worth updating all these old, previously indexed catalogues with better keyword juice and more relevant links ? Would they even get re-visited by google ? I suppose that leads to the next question... is it worth adding each of these pages to my sitemap ? To this point I have only added my major pages, not any of the subordinate pages etc.
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
How to block google robots from a subdomain
I have a subdomain that lets me preview the changes I put on my site. The live site URL is www.site.com, working preview version is www.site.edit.com The contents on both are almost identical I want to block the preview version (www.site.edit.com) from Google Robots, so that they don't penalize me for duplicated content. Is it the right way to do it: User-Agent: * Disallow: .edit.com/*
Technical SEO | | Alexey_mindvalley0 -
Exact match subdomains
Hi, I have seen significant SEO benefits from owning exact match domains and was wondering whether exact match subdomains hold the same (or some) of these benefits? eg. halloweencostumes.co.uk vs. halloween [dot] costumes.co.uk Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc0 -
Moving to the cloud - dynamic or static IP address?
We're looking at moving our websites to the cloud. Most services seem to default to providing a dynamic IP address, with static IP addresses being offered as paid extras. Is there an SEO disadvantage to having a dynamic IP address?
Technical SEO | | heatherrobinson0 -
Internal linking to subdomains
Hi *, I have a main site called example.org, and a lot of user generated pages to foo.example.org / bar.example.org and so on. Most of those pages link back to example.org. In example.org I have a page that links to all subdomains. How can I optimize the pagerank of the list page? Should I add nofollow to subdomain sites to avoid passing link juice to those sites and keep normal linking from subdomain sites?
Technical SEO | | ngw0