[Need advice!] A particular question about a subdomain to subfolder switch
-
Hello Moz Community!
I really was hoping to get your help on a issue that is bothering me for a while now. I know there is a lot of about this topic but I couldn’t find a good answer for my particular question.
We are running several web applications that are similar but are also different from each other. Right now, each one has its own subdomain (which was mainly due to technical reasons).
Like this: webapp1.rootdomain.com, webapp2.rootdomain.com etc.
Our root domain currently points with 301 to webapp1.rootdomain.com.
Now, we are thinking about making two changes:
- changing to a subfolder level like this: rootdomain.com/webapp1 , rootdomain.com/webapp2 etc.
- Changing our rootdomain to a landing page (lisitng all the apps) and take out the 301 to webapp1
We want to do these changes mainly for SEO reasons. I know that the advantages are not so clear between subdomain/subfolder but we think it could be the right way to go to push the root domain and profit more from juice passing to the different apps.
The problem is that we had a bad experience when we first switched from our first wep app (rootdomain.com) to an subdomain (webapp1.rootdomain.com) to set them equal with the other apps. Our traffic dropped a lot and it took us 6 weeks to get back on the same level as before. Maybe it was the 301 not passing all juice or maybe it was the switch to the subdomain. We are not sure.
So, I guess my question is do you think it is the right thing to do for web apps to go with subfolders to pass more juice from root to subfolders? Will it bring again huge drops in traffic once we make that change? Is it worth taking that risk or initial drop because it will pay off in the future?
Thanks a lot in advance! Your answers would help me a lot.
-
Thanks a lot for the answer SMG. I really appreciate it.
The one thing that is special about our case is that we actually only need organic traffic on the individual apps not on the root domain. Therefore we mostly care about the strength of the individual apps. I simply assume that a lot of people will link the landing page (rootdomain.com). So, with a subfolder system I hope to get more juice from the root domain to the apps and also that app1 for example can better support app2 with a better distribution of the root domain strength.
Well, I guess there might be no other way than to try it. If anyone else has another opinion I would love to hear it before I make the changes tomorrow.
-
Hi,
Whereas I can agree that having the webapps in the same domain WILL help push the root domain, I also agree care will have to be taken as to how it is done.
For instance, you mentioned you will be changing your root domain to become a landing page, this automatically affect the traffic that will go to webapp1 as you are offering people the choice. Webapp1 traffic will decrease from the 100% (albeit 301) traffic.
Also ensure the subdomains are 301 to the /webapp folder, but this too will cause a leakage (initially) as juice will need to be passed from the subdomain to the root. Root domain traffic and content will increase though which is a positive.
Ensuring any newly moved page has an equivalent 301 there should be no need to lose traffic as the traffic is simply being redirected, but without knowing what specifically happened the first time, it is hard to advise what to avoid I'm afraid.
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
-
DA vs Relevancy - Trade Off Question
Hey Guys We all know that relevancy largely trumps DA nowadays. What I am wondering is if there is a DA 'level' at which relevancy doesn't really matter - you probably still want a backlink from that site... For example, sites with DA of 100 we probably want backlinks from. So where do you draw the line? What I mean is for a high DA 'non relevant' site, what DA is 'acceptable' where you start to disregard relevancy? I'm thinking something like 70 and above would like some other thoughts... Obviously you would still be building relevant links too, developing content to do so and all that good stuff. I am just wondering what DA I should focus on for building non-relevant links ALONGSIDE relevant links 🙂 Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTAMP0 -
Need help with Robots.txt
An eCommerce site built with Modx CMS. I found lots of auto generated duplicate page issue on that site. Now I need to disallow some pages from that category. Here is the actual product page url looks like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nahid
product_listing.php?cat=6857 And here is the auto generated url structure
product_listing.php?cat=6857&cPath=dropship&size=19 Can any one suggest how to disallow this specific category through robots.txt. I am not so familiar with Modx and this kind of link structure. Your help will be appreciated. Thanks1 -
Switching the IP?
I am currently in the process of migrating a site, the domain will stay the same, it will go from example.com to example.com. The only thing that is changing is the IP address and the host. The server's will still be in America. I have done research on this question and have gotten varied answers, some saying that the ip change will affect the SEO rankings depending on where country is, and some saying that Google only looks at the URL not the ip address in terms of rankings. Does anyone have an answer so I can be prepared and mitigate as much damage as possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asher0 -
Followup question to rand(om) question: Would two different versions (mobile/desktop) on the same URL work well from an SEO perspective and provide a better overall end-user experience?
We read today's rand(om) question on responsive design. This is a topic we have been thinking about and ultimately landing on a different solution. Our opinion is the best user experience is two version (desktop and mobile) that live on one URL. For example, a non-mobile visitor that visits http://www.tripadvisor.com/ will see the desktop (non-responsive) version. However, if a mobile visitor (i.e. iOS) visits the same URL they will see a mobile version of the site, but it is still on the same URL There is not a separate subdomain or URL - instead the page dynamically changes based on the end user's user agent. It looks like they are accomplishing this by using javascript to change the physical layout of the page to match the user's device. This is what we are considering doing for our site. It seems this would simultaneously solve the problems mentioned in the rand(om) question and provide an even better user experience. By using this method, we can create a truly mobile version of the website that is similar to an app. Unfortunately, mobile versions and desktop users have very different expectations and behaviors while interacting with a webpage. I'm interested to hear the negative side of developing two versions of the site and using javascript to serve the "right" version on the same URL. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidangotti0 -
.htaccess question/opinion/advice needed
Hello, I am trying to achieve 3 different things on my .htaccess I just want to make sure I am doing it the right or best way because I don't have much experience working on this kind of files. I am trying to: a) Redirect www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com so I don't get a duplicate content/tag error. b) Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com c) Get rid of the file extensions; www.mysite.com/stuff.html to www.mysite.com/stuff This is the code that I'm currently using and it seems to work fine, however I would like someone with experience to take a look so I can avoid internal server errors and other kinds of issues. I grabbed each piece of code from different posts and tutorials. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan
RewriteEngine on Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L] RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc] Thanks a lot!0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Another E-commerce Canonical Question
Hi guys, Quick question: one of our clients has an e-commerce site with a very poor canonical tag setup and thousands of pages of duplicate content. Let's use this as an example: BRAND > Category > Type > Color
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse
Four separate pages/URLs. The BRAND page lists all products.
The Category page lists all BRAND products for that category.
The Type page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category.
The Color page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category of a specific color. Anyway, these generate four separate URLs: /BRAND
/BRAND/Category
/BRAND/Category-Type
/BRAND/Category-Type-Color Avoiding duplicate content and product listings, I would appreciate your proposed canonicalization strategy/feedback.0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0