Will this subdomain produce results?
-
.
-
I'd agree that the main domain would be ideal but if there are too many business reasons (or financial burdens), you would probably be okay with a subdomain. A subdomain does get some benefit from the root domain.
Certainly, if you do go with a subdomain route you'll want to make sure that you do all the right things around that subdomain (links, optimization, social, etc.) so that Google/Bing see indicators not just to the root domain but the subdomain as well. Along with that, you'll want to have plenty of internal linking between the main site and the subdomain site.
One other thought is, is it possible to do this as a sub-directory (suretybond.com/storefront)? A sub-directory would be considerably more beneficial from an SEO standpoint since you don't have to worry about how much link juice/trust/authority is passed from the root domain to the subdomain. I realize technically that isn't always possible given the way things are configured.
Also, there was a good blog post about this on SEOmoz from 2009 that you might want to check out. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
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
-
Blocking Dynamic Search Result Pages From Google
Hi Mozzerds, I have a quick question that probably won't have just one solution. Most of the pages that Moz crawled for duplicate content we're dynamic search result pages on my site. Could this be a simple fix of just blocking these pages from Google altogether? Or would Moz just crawl these pages as critical crawl errors instead of content errors? Ultimately, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to rank for these pages but I don't think it's worth it considering I have multiple product pages that rank well. I think in my case, the best is probably to leave out these search pages since they have more of a negative impact on my site resulting in more content errors than I would like. So would blocking these pages from the Search Engines and Moz be a good idea? Maybe a second opinion would help: what do you think I should do? Is there another way to go about this and would blocking these pages do anything to reduce the number of content errors on my site? I appreciate any feedback! Thanks! Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewstorys0 -
Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?
My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential. Currently they look like this: shop.example.com blog.example.com uk.example.com us.example.com After the reverse proxy they'll look like this: example.com/uk/ example.com/us/ example.com/us/shop example.com/us/blog I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well. My questions are: Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301? Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag? When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking? Thanks so much! Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
Subdomained White-Label Sites
Wanted to pass along a specific use-case that I'm thinking through in the technical setup for a client. Site: http://www.abc.com is an ecommerce company that offers the ability to white-label a site so an affiliate can join and get access to the site, and ultimately get a cut of whatever is sold through that affiliate. So I join the site and get access to scott.xyz.com and can handle my business through that. From a technical standpoint, this is the proposed technical setup of the site. Canonical URLS will be set to www.xyz.com Pages on scott.xyz.com will be set to noindex, while the main www.xyz.com will be set to be indexed Webmaster Tools for scott.xyz.com will be set to have preferred domain of www.xyz.com scott.xyz.com will have separate robots.txt instructing to block crawl Questions Am I missing any steps in properly setting up the technical background of the subdomain sites? The use of subdomains isn't something that I am able to move away from. Will any links in to scott.xyz.com pass juice and authority to www.xyz.com, or does the noindex/nocrawl block that from happening? Is there anything else that I am missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemarieReed
Scott0 -
International Subdomain Headache
My client set up a separate domain for their international clients, then set up separate subdomains for each country where they're active (so, for example, the original site is xx.com and the global is xxworldwide.com, with subdomains like mx.xxxworldwide.com). They auto-translated a large amount of content and put the translations on those international sites. The idea was to draw in native speakers. Now, I don't think this is a great practice, obviously, and I'm worried that it could hurt their original site (the xxx.com in the example above). My concern is that Google will see through the translated text, since it was handled with Google Translate, and penalize both sites. I don't think the canonical tag applies here, since Google recommends a no-follow for autotranslated text, but I've also never dealt with this type of situation before. Anyways, if you made it through all of that, congratulations. My question is whether xxx.com is getting any negative effects other than a potential loss of link juice -- and whether there's any legitimate way to present auto-translated text with a few minor changes without incurring a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
Best method for blocking a subdomain with duplicated content
Hello Moz Community Hoping somebody can assist. We have a subdomain, used by our CMS, which is being indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/
https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/ The page is the same so we can't add a no-index or no-follow.
I have both set up as separate properties in webmaster tools I understand the best method would be to update the robots.txt with a user disallow for the subdomain - but the robots text is only accessible on the main domain. http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt Will this work if we add the subdomain exclusion to this file? It means it won't be accessible on https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt (where we can't create a file). Therefore won't be seen within that specific webmaster tools property. I've also asked the developer to add a password protection to the subdomain but this does not look possible. What approach would you recommend?0 -
Sitemap on a Subdomain
Hi, For various reasons I placed my sitemaps on a subdomain where I keep images and other large files (static.example.com). I then submitted this to Google as a separate site in Webmaster tools. Is this a problem? All of the URLs are for the actual site (www.example.com), the only issue on my end is not being able to look at it all at the same time. But I'm wondering if this would cause any problems on Google's end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | enotes0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Can you appear in both Google local and universal results on the page?
I have a client that ranks 2nd for a google local result, and the local results are the first set of results being displayed, making it in fact the 2nd result on the page for the keyword. There aren't any blended results on this page, it's straightforward local results, then universal results directly after. They are concerned that they are not appearing in the universal results high enough (they're on page 5 with a different url than the homepage). I'm not sure why their #2 local ranking isn't good enough since those are consistently the same results, but I have to ask; Can you appear in both local and universal results on the same page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0