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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Should I Re-direct Domains to Internal Pages on Money Site
I have an ecommerce site that is fully built out with thousands of products. I own many industry related domains for the products that i sell. Many of these domains are sitting unused. I started to think that it would beneficial if i 301 redirect (at the registrar level) these domains to their SPECIFIC subcategories on my main money site. For example, i sell sporting goods and my main website is buysportinggoods.com I also own the following domains: basketballoutlet.com & baseballequipmentstore.com & footballpads.com Would it be wise or foolish (and potentially cause a Google penalty) if i did the following: Point basketballoutlet.com to buysportinggoods.com/basketballs Point baseballequipmentstore.com to buysportinggoods.com/baseball Point footballpads.com to buysportinggoods.com/football Please let me know your thoughts or experiences with similar situations. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
SEO Concerns From Moving Mobile M Dot site to Responsive Version?
I currently have my mobile site set up as a m dot site. I have designed a new responsive/adaptive version of my desktop site I would like to start using. When I search from google on mobile, my website is indexed as the m dot site. When I make the switch, this will no longer be the case as I will only have one url for both mobile and desktop. The m dot url's will no longer work. Are there any SEO consequences from making this shift?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeylong70 -
We are looking for an SEO Company to hire to assist in upgrading a site to Wordpress
Does anyone have a good recommendation or better yet personal experience with one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCMotors20 -
Changing title tags in well established site - should I do this gradually to avoid risk of penalty?
Hi, I'm altering title tags in a well established site (many of which are duplicates) and was wondering whether there's a risk associated with adjusting them all in one go? Should I just make gradual changes instead in case I flag anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Hot to move 3 websites into 1 SEO wise and recover from penaltys in the process?
I decided to migrate 3 EMDs and all of its content into 1 big new website. 1.) I will manually move each page/post to the new website, on new hosting. 2.) Redirect each old url to new via htaccess (how long do I have to wait before I simply change DNS records on my old domains, and just point it to the new domain - want to drop one hosting plan in the process) 3.) Tell Google via Webmaster tools, that my site has moved to the new domain. Website A suffered from Penguin update, Website B suffered from EMD update and Website C is OK. I removed most of "bad" and "exect anchor text" links from websites. Could I just move the content, change DNS records and tell Google that my website moved. Any thoughts, advices and pointers are appreciated. Tnx Marko Strbac
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkoStrbac-SlovenianSEO0 -
Website Consolidation To Sub Domains or Leave Stand Alone
For a real estate SEO client they have their corporate site and then for each of their communities (10 of them) each community has their own website domains. One of their team members met with another search agency who recommended they move (consolidate) all their community domains under the corporate site as a sub domain. For example let's say their main site was www.maincompany.com and one of their communities was www.localcompany.com the other firm recommended they move that existing site to become localcompany.maincompany.com and for the other 9 communities to do the exact same thing. They shared that it would really help the corporate site and each of the communities improve search rankings. I am struggling to see how this could be possible and was hoping to get some perspective as the client has asked me to come in and give my opinion if they should proceed with this consolidation. Google has indexed each of their community sites and each site gets a decent amount of search traffic and rankings. Due to that I can't see any benefit to doing this. Since each sub domain would be considered a different site than it essentially is what they already have today so it does not raise domain authority for the main company site. Since, each community has a very different brand there would be little reason to go the main company site. What I mean by that is if a user went to localcompany.maincompany.com site I thought that some may (at least out of curiosity) remove the sub-domain to see the maincompany.com site. The look and feel of each are so different it would potentially cause user confusion too. So my thoughts are this would be a negative for both the search engines and user. So I can share factual pros/cons with clients, do you have any thoughts to the pro's / con's of this approach to consolidate/move other existing sites under a sub domain of the main corporate site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jfeitlinger1 -
SEO for one web site two domains
I have web site www.sxxxcafe.com and there is a another domain for the same like xxx.com .How can i use second domain for the same web site keeping SEO up and without loosing ranking .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0