3 Subdomains - Can their authority or ranking affect each other?
-
HI,
We have 3 different subdomains that target completely different industries.
a.example.com - school reviews
b.example.com - healthcare reviews
c.example.com - car reviewsQ1: If any of the above subdomains gets demoted or penalized by Google would that affect the other subdomains?
Q2: Moving forward with all the new changes in SEO, penalties, etc; would it be wise to utilize 3 subdomains for different industries or should we consider getting separate domains?
-
Thank you all for your response.
-
I have a different opinion based on my extensive experience working with subdomains. The big advantage to working with subdomains, is that they all benefit from the Domain Authority of the root url.
If you owned tacobell.com (with a DA of 80) and decided to create a web site on a subdomain for each location like tambabay.tacobell.com, that subdomain would benefit immediately from the root.
In my experience is the same is true for penalties, regardless of how the subdomains are linked, if in the example above, tacobell.com begins the spammiest seo campaign of all time, tampabay.tacobell.com absolutely will incur some, if not all of the wrath.
-
I agree with Chris, it depends on how "closely connected" your subdomains are. If you are sharing a lot of links in between the subdomains, then its likely that all the sites will be affected once detected by Google. However, do note that Google treats subdomain separately. This means that if you ensure the content in each of your subdomain is unique and perform different linking activities on them, it shouldn't be an issue.
On top of SEO concerns, if you are aiming to establish a review community under a common brand name, it would certainly be a good idea to use subdomains. For example, if a visitor looking for car reviews is impressed with your car review site, it is likely that he/she will look for healthcare reviews from your healthcare review site. One good example of this is Tutsplus, which has several subdomains under the giant umbrella of web development.
-
Daniel,
If you are linking to any large degree between the sites, or if the sites share a lot of links in their back link profiles, are part of joint manipulation effort such as link networks or link wheels they could all get penalized at the same time or the penalization of one could lead to the penalization of another. If they share a link from a single strong site that gets penalized and they loose the value of that link, all three could loose domain authority.
But if their linking activities are completely separate and above board, they should be fine residing on subdomians.
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
-
Do the sub domain backlinks count for main domain and increase authority?
Hi all, I just wonder if the back links for different sub domains will be counted and considered to rank the main domain better or they are just limit to sub domain pages? There are many websites which has got multiple sub domains which receive backlinks? So the backlinks to main domain and sub domain weigh same at Google? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
The Google Algo update that happened 1-8 is KILLING my rankings
Does anyone know what happened?? I have a great website, we ranked very highly for a slew of industry keywords, #1 in most of our top-money kws....and our keywords have been in freefall since the update. Help?!
Algorithm Updates | | Sean_Gutermuth0 -
All keywords increasing rank except URL Keyword, whats going on?
Hello, Our website is a private equity firm database, privateequityfirms.com. We rank well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms but unfortunately we have been losing ranking in our main keyword and url "private equity firms" .We have ranked as high as 3rd under wikipedia. The only real changes we have made are too the sitemap that is auto generated every time some thing is changed in the database. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? I have included a Image to help show the problem. Thank you! MozAnalyticsPDF115_zpsddec64fa.png
Algorithm Updates | | Nicktaylor10 -
Puzzled by recent SERP results - what ranking factors cause this?
Hi mozzers, I have been using moz tools for a long while now for assessing SEO metrics with great success, but since recent Google algorithm updates I am seeing more and more SERPS that just simply don't make sense to me what so ever. The most startling recently was an assessment of one of the keywords my own site competes for "Link Building Services" The current No 1 position in Google.co.uk is held by http://www.napalit.org/ I invite all you seo experts out there to take a look at this site, look at it metrics in OSE compared with the "lower" competition and explain to me why it is No1. I would really like to know what ranking factors this site has that makes it "higher quality" and offer "better value" than the competition. I thought I understood what Google was trying to do with recent updates - get rid of non-value adding spammers and improve the quality of the search results. But now I am becoming more sceptical. Are they just making it impossible for us to make a difference by following good SEO practices so we all resort to paying for Adwords? I hope you guys out there can help me with this one and restore my faith. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | websearchseo0 -
Are multiple domains for my website hurting my Google ranking?
Hello, I currently have two domains showing up in google search: shwoodshop.com shop.shwoodshop.com These domains are currently ranked in the #2 and #3 spot, however my page is much more trafficked than the current #1 ranking. I am wondering if the fact that I have two domains competing for the #1 spot is hurting my search ranking. If so, what is the best way to remedy this issue and get back my #1 spot? I'm rather new to SEO and teaching myself as I go, so I appreciate the feedback!
Algorithm Updates | | shwoodshop0 -
Dramatic Rankings Drop
We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight. I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything. If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it: http://www.EraseDisease.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Linwright0 -
How did my Page Authority and Page Rank disappear?
I've hit a problem. A couple days ago my site's page authority was 51 and the PR was 3 and now they're 1 and 0 respectively. The developer did adjust some of the code in the site in the past couple days but that shouldn't have affected this. It was last cached by Google on the 5th. Can anyone offer some good advice? If it helps the page is www.duracard.com
Algorithm Updates | | Andrea.G0