Will deindexing a subdomain negate the benefit of backlinks leading to that subdomain?
-
My client has a subdomain from their main site where their online waiver tool lives. Currently, all the waivers generated by users are creating indexed pages, I feel they should deindex that subdomain entirely. However, a lot of their backlinks are from their clients linking to their waivers.
If they end up deindexing their subdomain, will they lose the SEO benefit of backlinks pointing to that subdomain?
Thanks!
Jay
-
I'd say no as subdomain would appear to Search Engines as another, completely different website.
-
Hi Joe,
We still want people to be able to visit the subdomain and all its pages - we just don't want it to appear in search as the pages are user-generated and not meant for the general public. However, many of the backlinks point to those pages since users are getting their clients to sign electronic waivers on the subdomain.
So my question is, if we deindex the subdomain without 301 redirects, will the value of links pointing to that subdomain provide value to their primary web address?
-
I agree with Joe. Just deindexing will make sure you lose all the built up value.
Small addition: when creating 301 redirects, try to redirect to a new URL that is as closely related to the old one as possible.
-
Hello,
Create 301 redirects prior to deindexing, that way you won't lose anything.
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
-
.ac.uk subdomain vs .co.uk domain
I'd be grateful if I could check my thinking... I've agreed to give some quick advice to a non profit organisation who are in the process of moving their website from an ac.uk subdomain to a .co.uk domain. They believe that their SEO can be improved considerably by making this migration. From my experience, I don't see how this could be the case. Does the unique domain in itself offer enough ranking benefit to justify this approach? The subdomain is on a very high authority domain with many pre-existing links, which makes me even more nervous about this approach. Does anyone have any opinions on this that they could share please? I'm guessing that it is possible to migrate safely and that there might be branding advantages, but from an actual SEO point of view there is not that much benefit? It looks like most of their current traffic is branded traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Are these good backlinks?
I am trying to understand how to build good backlinks. I've read or been told that anchor text is bad (understood), websites with unrelated subjects is bad (understood), paid-for links are bad (?), "submitted" and article to get the link is bad (?), or it is a link/farm directory are bad (?). This is actually really confusing to me! Please bear with my silly questions, I am an engineer with an MBA, stay-at-home/homeschooling mom that helps run my husbands business. My brain gets full fast! Ha! I thought maybe if I post some of the links we have built, someone could look at them and tell me if they are good or bad. This way I can go forward understanding better. Articles... I thought that writing articles was a GOOD thing! Now I see that submitting articles isn't? So what about these two articles where my husband, as an expert in his field, wrote an article for a popular mag/blog. http://coastalanglermag.com/red-snapper-season/ (they did the hyperlink wrong and I am trying to get the publisher to fix it) http://www.bdoutdoors.com/article/shark-encounter-capt.-gregg-rapp/ (this is a pretty funny story if you read it) Blog stories... what about when someone copies your blog post as a story on their website? Or someone scrapes your content? http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/ http://www.bdoutdoors.com/article/heart-pressure/ http://www.sportfishermen.com/board/showthread.php?t=2627767&p=3294972 (we post fishing reports and they get copied) Un-related Directories... http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Glowing_Deep_Sea_Fish/ (I didn't create this!!! I guess they just crawl and link?) Related "farm" Directories http://www.sportsmansresource.com/ffishtarpon.htm Other directories/citations such as yellow pages, city search, etc. These are okay right? Local hotels and what not... concierge's link to me, I don't even ask them to http://laquintacocoabeach.com/things-to-do/index.cfm Paid - I pay for MOZ Local! Isn't that paying??? AND, I paid for a whois listing on enom... is that bad too? NOW FOR THE BAD.... these are bad right? http://darman.niniyoo.com/Sea-Leveler-Sport-Fishing-Charters-Inc-FL.html (I have no idea how this got there) http://teensnow.comwww.whoisbusinesslistings.com/Other/10/23490/Sea-Leveler-Sport-Fishing-Charters.html (what the heck is this??? how can they even append a website on a website?) http://forums.gq.com.au/member.php?u=1813973 (I think this was created on my behalf by my part-time SEO) If you have read all the way down to here, my sincerest thanks! Thank you for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
How to add subdomains to webmaster tools?
Can anyone help with how I add a sub domain to webmaster tools? Also do I need to create a seperate sitemap for each sub domain? Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
Will changing a subdirectory name negatively effect local ranking?
We submitted a group of 50+ franchise stores into UBL to fulfill directory listings back in September. We are now looking at changing the some of the URL structure to include city names. Example: website.com/store/store-name(not city) to website.com/location/city-store-name Will changing the subdirectory and resubmitting to the directory aggregators negatively effect their search results? Thanks, Jake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AESEO0 -
The use of subdomains to improve SEO?
A clients website which provide a number of trade services which have a page for each service they provide for example: carpentry or electrician or plumbing etc. currently these pages are found at domain.co.uk/bathrooms/ bathrooms.html I am trying to optmise each page better as they are competing with other sites who for example sell bathrooms rather than bathroom installers or plumbers. As part of the on page optimisation I plan to change the page names and directory structure. I had an idea to split the website down into subdomains for various sections i.e for all their services Create a sub domain such as http://plumber.domain.co.uk 2.) upload the relevant content (in this example the plumbing page) to the sub domain location 3.) correct all the links to absolute URLs for each sub domain / Will this help target better use of keywords in the URL in terms of SEO efforts ? hope it makes sense thanks Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Canonical URL redirect to different domain - SEO benefits?
Hello Folks, We are having a SEO situation here, and hope your support will help us figure out that. Let's say there are two different domains www.subdomian.domianA.com and www.domainB.com. subdomain.domainA is what we want to promote and drive SEO traffic. But all our content lies in domainB. So one of the thoughts we had is to duplicate the domainB's content on subdomian.domainA and have a canonical URL redirect implemented. Questions: Will subdomain.domainA.com get indexed in search engines for the content in domainB by canonical redirect? Do we get the SEO benefits? So is there any other better way to attain this objective? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
Hello everbody! I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines. We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic? kind regards, Jeroen from the Netherlands
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeroenpf0