Adding academic content for a school in a sub folder, sub domain, or different site?
-
I manage the website for a school and we are planning to put our academic policies/student handbook online. I’m curious if there is any SEO value to including this content in our main website?
This isn’t stuff that anyone is going to link to externally (student orientation procedures, how to enroll/drop credits, academic warning policies etc) and there would be limited internal linking as well (someone looking for course information doesn’t want to see this type of stuff).
I’m not interested in SERPs for this content, but I’m wondering if the additional content could help the site’s SEO overall? It is naturally rich with ‘academic’ keywords and the only websites that use this type of content are universities.
On a similar note, I need to put up student profiles for potential employers to view. Like the policies, this is not priority content for someone visiting our website, but it is still keyword-rich content, which would add to the overall 'size' of the site.
Should this stuff go in a folder, a subdomain, or in a different location altogether?
-
The more content that ends up ranking for it's own topical focus, the better the whole site does - it all gets a lift. The critical key though is topical relationships. If the content becomes too diverse across a site, it can weaken the site's topical consistency. The exception to this concept is if the site is intended to be a "general information" site covering a vast range of topics. However even in that case, when a site gets too diverse, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get individual topics to rank because only so much time and energy can go into supporting any individual topic.
-
Thanks - great answers.
Beyond the technical considerations, is there an SEO benefit to having a larger site with more content, especially if the content is keyword-rich?
Again, I'm not looking for this additional content to rank in search results (students who want it can navigate from the home page themselves) but does the additional content help the overall domain credibility/authority?
-
If the information contained in the academic policies is not needing to be kept confidential, and if that information is valuable to students (or even perhaps people considering becoming students, or parents of existing or potential students), then for those reasons, it would be legitimate to make it accessible from the main site without them having to go hunt for it.
Given those reasons, I believe it would be perfectly valid to have it be crawlable and indexable by search engines.
I would also group it all together in a dedicated location (such as a sub-folder hierarchically) with it's own sectional sub-navigation because it's no different than any other quality content - grouping topically focused similar content is proper for user experience.
As for the student profiles that's a completely different issue. This one involves the reality that it is most likely most student profiles are going to have very little depth of unique content. I assume students will fill out the content themselves. That leaves the door open for all sorts of good, bad and ugly.
Further, if there is some reason for students, faculty or other staff to be able to access it without having to sign in to a secure area, that is not a reason to have it found in search engines.
There are privacy concerns (so a secure area is then in fact, the best option if that's the case).
Most likely being "thin" or even some low quality or perceived duplicate content, if it's not hidden behind a log-int, it really should be blocked from search engines in a robots.txt file or use noindex,nofollow meta tags. (no valid reason to do noindex,follow).
Having said all that, I would suggest it could just as well go in a sub-folder of the main site or a separate sub-domain. Since it will be blocked from indexation/crawling, either would work.
One final reason it shouldn't be indexed or followed is as students come and go, that way you don't need to worry about a "301" redirect system to deal with them.
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
-
Duplicate Content for Locations on my Directory Site
I have a pretty big directory site using Wordpress with lots of "locations", "features", "listing-category" etc.... Duplicate Content: https://www.thecbd.co/location/california/ https://www.thecbd.co/location/canada/ referring URL is www.thecbd.co is it a matter of just putting a canonical URL on each location, or just on the main page? Would this be the correct code to put: on the main page? Thanks Everyone!
Technical SEO | | kay_nguyen0 -
Site Crawl -> Duplicate Page Content -> Same pages showing up with duplicates that are not
These, for example: | https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_campaign=july15&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=blog | 1 | 2 | 29 | 2 | 200 |
Technical SEO | | writezach
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.145821812.1573134750.1440742418 | 1 | 1 | 25 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=brightpod-article | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=tapclicks&utm_medium=marketplace&utm_campaign=homepage | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=first-3-must-watch-videos | 1 | 119 | 40 | 4 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php?_ga=1.159789566.2132270851.1418408142 | 1 | 5 | 31 | 2 | 200 |
| https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php/?utm_source=vocus&utm_medium=PR&utm_campaign=52release | Any suggestions/directions for fixing or should I just disregard this "High Priority" moz issue? Thank you!0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Merging multiple sites and contacting linking domains
This is strictly academic but I am having a friendly debate and I am hoping you guys could help me. If I decided that I wanted to merge several websites into a single new URL doing everything I am supposed to (page to page 301 redirects, etc), will I still need to reach out to those important websites that link to my different sites to have them change the links and anchor text to point to the new site? I know that 90% of the link juice is supposed to transfer and that you are SUPPOSED to contact linking domains, but is it really worth it, especially if there are literally hundreds of sites to contact?
Technical SEO | | Mike_Davis0 -
Tutorial For Moving Blogger Blog From Sub-Domain to Sub-Directory
Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Why am i receiving two different speed reports for my site
Hi i am a bit puzzled. i am optimizing my site to speed it up but i am getting two different speed reports. my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the two speed websites i am using are http://tools.pingdom.com and http://gtmetrix.com Can anyone please let me know what results they are getting for my site with the two above tools and also why i am getting two different results. the other day before i made some changes, i was getting on average 2 seconds for loading speed, but at the moment, sometimes i am getting seven seconds and then when i test it again it goes down to three seconds or below. Also, does anyone know how i can test to make sure that my site is faster when you go from one page to another on my site. I am not getting the true loading experience on my site from one page to another because good old virgin are updating their broadband in our area and we have also had voltage problem, whatever this means on our broadband box outside on our street which they claim they have sorted. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10