Question regarding subdomains and duplicate content
-
Hey everyone,
I have another question regarding duplicate content. We are planning on launching a new sector in our industry to satisfy a niche. Our main site works as a directory with listings with NAP. The new sector that we are launching will be taking all of the content on the main site and duplicating it on a subdomain for the new sector.
We still want the subdomain to rank organically, but I'm having struggles between putting a rel=canonical back to main site, or doing a self-referencing canonical, but now I have duplicates.
The other idea is to rewrite the content on each listing so that the menu items are still the same, but the listing description is different. Do you think this would be enough differentiating content that it won't be seen as a duplicate?
Obviously make this to be part of the main site is the best option, but we can't do that unfortunately.
Last question, what are the advantages or disadvantages of doing a subdomain?
-
Hi there I just want to make sure I'm interpreting the question right so do let me know if any of the below is false;
- You're launching a website subdomain to target a different industry niche
- You cannot target this niche with your main site
- Your subdomain will be duplicating the content on your main site and you are concerned about the drawbacks of that duplicate content.
One of my questions would be - if you can't target this niche on the main site, why is the strategy to copy main site content over? It seems as though if duplicate content will successfully target this niche on a subdomain, surely it can do the same on the main domain? If it is the case that there needs to be differentiation then it'd be a good idea to consider how to create content specifically targeting that niche. Search engines are doing everything they can to make it so that their definition of a good site aligns with users' definition of a good site, it's worth considering why it's so difficult to figure out how to get these pages ranking - is it because we're trying to create something that actually isn't targeted to users in a way that'll be successful even if it does rank?
You're right, if you canonicalise the new pages to the old pages they are duplicating, then by design the new ones are unlikely to rank. If you don't canonicalise them, you aren't giving either the old pages or the new pages a fair shot because they aren't offering anything new for the search terms they do target, and you're ignoring the opportunity to cover off new and more specific search terms you couldn't before.
Without knowing the exact details of the situation I would say; don't duplicate main site content onto this subdomain, start from scratch, find out what people in this niche want, what they are searching, what matters to them, design the subdomain to fit that need and only consider the main site in terms of avoiding competing with it.
Re: the issue of whether to go subdomain at all, there is evidence that subdomains don't share as much authority with the site overall as subdirectories do, it depends on how different this new niche is from your main offering. Does it make sense for a user to find this whole other niche in a subdirectory of your main site, or is the niche dissimilar enough that you should differentiate it with a subdomain?
I hope that helps, I think I've probably given more questions than answers but I think they are important questions for your business to consider. If I've misunderstood or if there's anything you'd like to discuss, do message back.
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
-
Impact of wiping content on a subdomain
Hi, I've been asked to look at the impact of bulk deleting content on a blog subdomain and how it could impact the SEO of a linked www subdomain. Can deleting content on one subdomain have a negative impact on other linked subdomains? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | think-web0 -
Are online tools considered thin content?
My website has a number of simple converters. For example, this one converts spaces to commas
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ConvertTown
https://convert.town/replace-spaces-with-commas Now, obviously there are loads of different variations I could create of this:
Replace spaces with semicolons
Replace semicolons with tabs
Replace fullstops with commas Similarly with files:
JSON to XML
XML to PDF
JPG to PNG
JPG to TIF
JPG to PDF
(and thousands more) If somoene types one of those into Google, they will be happy because they can immediately use the tool they were hunting for. It is obvious what these pages do so I do not want to clutter the page up with unnecessary content. However, would these be considered doorway pages or thin content or would it be acceptable (from an SEO perspective) to generate 1000s of pages based on all the permutations?1 -
What tools do you use to find scraped content?
This hasn’t been an issue for our company so far, but I like to be proactive. What tools do you use to find sites that may have scraped your content? Looking forward to your suggestions. Vic
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Looking for a Way to Standardize Content for Thousands of Pages w/o Getting Duplicate Content Penalties
Hi All, I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :). So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages. So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically: "Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same. It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized. Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages. So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check. Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you! Pedram1 -
Schema.org tricking and duplicate content across domains
I've found the following abuse, and Im curious what could I do about it. Basically the scheme is: own some content only once (pictures, description, reviews etc) use different domain names (no problem if you use the same IP or IP-C address) have a different layout (this is basically the key) use schema.org tricking, meaning show (the very same) reviews on different scale, show a little bit less reviews on one site than on an another Quick example: http://bit.ly/18rKd2Q
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sved
#2: budapesthotelstart.com/budapest-hotels/hotel-erkel/szalloda-attekintes.hu.html (217.113.62.21), 328 reviews, 8.6 / 10
#6: szallasvadasz.hu/hotel-erkel/ (217.113.62.201), 323 reviews, 4.29 / 5
#7: xn--szlls-gyula-l7ac.hu/szallodak/erkel-hotel/ (217.113.62.201), no reviews shown It turns out that this tactic even without the 4th step can be quite beneficial to rank with several domains. Here is a little investigation I've done (not really extensive, took around 1 and a half hour, but quite shocking nonetheless):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqbt1cVFlhXbdENGenFsME5vSldldTl3WWh4cVVHQXc#gid=0 Kaspar Szymanski from Google Webspam team said that they have looked into it, and will do something, but honestly I don't know whether I could believe it or not. What do you suggest? should I leave it, and try to copy this tactic to rank with the very same content multiple times? should I deliberately cheat with markups? should I play nice and hope that these guys sooner or later will be dealt with? (honestly can't see this one working out) should I write a case study for this, so maybe if the tactics get bigger attention, then google will deal with it? Does anybody could push this towards Matt Cutts, or anybody else who is responsible for these things?0 -
Switching site content
I have been advised to take a particular path with my domain, to me it seems "black hat" but ill ask the experts: Is it acceptable when one owns an exact match location domain eg london.com, to run as a tourist information site, gathering links from wikipedia,bbc,local paper/radio/sports websites etc, then after 6 - 12 months, switch the content to a business site? What could the penalties be? Please advise...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl0 -
Does having the same descrition for different products a bad thing the titles are all differnent but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?
does having the same description for different products a bad thing the titles are all different but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Casefun1