Fourth and Third Level Subdomain Interlinking
-
Hi everyone. I have a hopefully interesting client question I wanted to pose. I do work for a company with three distinct locations that have unique offerings, service areas, etc.
I wouldn't want to see the three locations as subfolders (example company.com/locationone/, company.com/locationtwo/) of one site. They are large and unique presences. Fortunately, they did not organize their locations in such a way, and currently have their locations organized as subdomains, as in locationone.company.com, locationtwo.company.com. I might have preferred locationone.com, locationtwo.com, etc., but that is what I am working with.
Their developer has been building new content on fourth level domains, as in newcontent.locationone.company.com and newcontent2.locationone.company.com. In one case one of these fourth level domains also contains a different but parallel checkout process to the one already present on third level domain locationone.company.com.
I am looking for advice on how to interlink these sites, and whether to discourage them from building out new fourth level domains (newcontent3.locationone.company.com, etc.) or even to get rid of the current fourth level domains altogether. I'm not sure if the fact that they're subdomains and not subfolders matters as much as it used to.
Is this a case of subdomain phobia, or are my concerns justified? Any special advice on dealing with interlinking across fourth, third, and second level domains?
Thanks!
-
Hi Robyn,
Tom Schmitz has written awesome post on inter linking and website structure. Here is the link:
Hope this will help you out....
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
-
Backlinks to less important subdomain
We have two subdomains on our site: blogs and *www. Our most important and competitive pages are on the www subdomain. I have some pages on the blogs subdomain that have valuable backlinks. Would it be helpful to our SEO efforts for the www subdomain to move and redirect those pages on the blogs subdomain to the www subdomain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCF0 -
Penguin 4.0 and homepage level penalties
Hey folks Looking to get some input from what other people are seeing with Penguin 4.0 and historically penalised sites. We have three sites we are looking at currently - all had historically brutal penguin penalties. All have done extensive clean up and are respectable businesses and have seen some manor of recovery or improvement. However, we are seeing issues at a homepage level with these three sites in that the homepage currently does not rank for the main terms but an inner page does in it's place (but not as well as we would expect given everything else). This applies to a single keyword on all three of these sites - add a modifier to that keyword and they rank top of first page (often 1st place). Example of modifiers being 'installer', 'uk', 'supplier' etc. That main keyword though only ranks top of 3rd page in this instance and it is an inner page and not the homepage which is the best fit for the targeted term. Question Is anyone else seeing this? Sites that have gone from no visibility in top 50 for a previously abused term that are now seeing some visibility page 2 / page 3 for the big terms and top of page 1 visibility for those terms + modifiers. Thoughts This seems a bit odd to me and hard to understand in light of the Penguin 4.0 announcement if there is no demotion and only devaluation of bad links then why would a single page still be seemingly so heavily effected how can an algorithm that focuses on devaluation of bad links still be granular as this seems to be a penalty of sorts that effects a specific page for a specific keyword (the one most abused historically in terms of link building). two of these are big companies, biggest in their industry in the real world with lots of high visibility clients like TV shows, IKEA etc. Lots of natural highly authoritative links, good content etc - we are digging in further but certainly looks like they have their house largely in order. Note We have one other client that I believe is seeing something similar on an internal page and that page was the main link target for spammy links of old that are now removed. However, it appears Google has a memory regarding even these removed links. I mention this primarily as I don't believe this is homepage specific but rather that is the case as the homepage was the main link target historically. Summary These sites are seeing movement - huge movement. Not exactly what we would expect though given the extensive clean up and talk around how this release of the algorithm works. Be interested to see what you are seeing out there folks and if anyone has seen anything similar. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
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 -
Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains
I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
weddingsbarcelona.com
surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!0 -
Purchase second-level gTLDs?
So, I've been asked if it makes SEO sense for our company to grab a bunch of second-level gTLD (which we were earlier calling gTLD subdomains incorrectly) so that we can capitalize on redirecting them to our relevant pages that might not be ranking as well (if Google treats them like EMDs). For instance, buy something analogous to red.shoes, blue.shoes, purple.shoes and so on and then redirect them to our relevant pages for that product. Someone owns the .shoes domain but is happy to sell us second-level domains like red.shoes for $20-30. The question is, if we scoop up 100 or so of these relevant to our product, will it matter? I guess it depends on how Google is going to treat these. Anyone know?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
Subdomain and root domain
Hey Everyone, our page has multiple domains and I'm wondering how it affects search rankings today. I saw some stuff from almost a year ago, but I'm not sure if something has changed. We currently have our root domain "www.xyz.com" and started moving some pages over to a different sub-domain "web.xyz.com" because of usability and ease of adjusting content. How much will this affect our seo? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
How do i get over my alt tage problems at a cateogry level?
At present at a category level, our site does not incorporate images specific to the category you are in and therefore we do not have appropriate alt tags to suffice SEO requirements.It only covers categories you are navigating too. e.g. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm (no image placement available on page for that category, it only shows sub categories Does anyone have any suggestions how we get over this? How big a deal is it to not have image with appropriate keyword driven alt tag? Can you put more than 1 keyword phrase in a alt tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0