Sub-domains for keyword targeting? (specific example question)
-
Hey everyone, I have a question I believe is interesting and may help others as well.
Our competitor heavily (over 100-200) uses sub-domains to rank in the search engines... and is doing quite well. What's strange, however, is that all of these sub-domains are just archives -- they're 100% duplicate content! An example can be seen here where they just have a bunch of relevant posts archived with excerpts.
How is this ranking so well? Many of them are top 5 for keywords in the 100k+ range. In fact their #1 source of traffic is SEO for many of the pages.
As an added question: is this effective if you were to actually have a quality/non-duplicate page?
Thanks! Loving this community.
-
No, they did all of their research just about that. Trust me, they can tell. Try to limit the number of ads, don't remove them, just limit to no more than 2 per page.
-
Thanks a lot, Kate.
This makes a lot of sense, and I really do need to re-visit my advertising format.
I was under the impression that since the sidebar ads are simply images that Google may not see them as purely advertisements? These ads are the entirety of our current income so it is a confusing situation as to how to work this issue.
Thanks for your answer & future contributions.
-
The one piece of feedback I can give is that your pages have way too much advertising. If Panda didn't affect you before I can see it doing it in the future. This competitor has tons of resources on the topic and seems to be a better result for broad terms like aspartame. If you want to rank for broad terms like that, I'd work at developing a resource center for searchers of that term. They could be looking up that broad of a word for many reasons, answer those and don't focus on the ads. Focus on being the best answer for the query.
-
Thanks for this great reply, Kate.
It appears that they actually must be editing the excerpts from the originals so that it isn't duplicate. This site, on their sub-domains specifically, dominates a large number of terms such as aspartame, kirll oil, gmo, etc. -- sometimes multiple times on the front page.
We have a few modest pages competing for many terms, including this one for aspartame and this one for 'genetically modified foods' -- this one getting quite a few linkbacks.
On a side note, we have a page that is the 10th most shared in 2011 with over 236,000 shares and it's still not ranking hardly at all.
Thanks a ton for any feedback, it is very much appreciated.
-
While this is not the best use of their time and something that as a consultant I'd recommend against, the content on that page is not duplicated from what I can tell. The page is about aspartame and links to other articles on the subject. It looks like the content is on other sites, but I can't determine who scraped whom. Can you tell me what page you have that is competing against this one? I'd be happy to give some advice. But for right now, I can't see an issue here.
And no, generally putting things on subdomains is not effective but done right it can be. I don't want to say it isn't overall but we traditionally recommend against it.
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
-
Question on canonicals
hi community let's say i have to 2 e-commerce sites selling the same English books in different currencies - one of the site serves the UK market ( users can purchase in sterling) while another one European markets ( user can purchase in euro). Sites are identical. SEO wise, while the "European" site homepage has a good ranking across major search engines in europe, product pages do not rank very well at all. Since site is a .com too it s hard to push it in local search engines. I would like then to push one of the sites across all search engines,tackling duplicate content etc.Geotargeting would make the rest. I would like to add canonicals tag pointing at the UK version across all EU site product pages, while leaving the EU homepage rank. I have 2 doubts though: is it ok to have canonical tags pointing at an external site. is it ok to have part of a site with canonical tags, while other parts are left ranking?
Technical SEO | | Mrlocicero0 -
Domain Authority
Hello everyone, My question is: is there any manual way to increase domain authority, rather than link building to domain (homepage) ? Thanks Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Changing Domain Name
Hi all, A client has just got their .edu domain and they want to change their current domain name (a .com) to this new .edu domain. The domain's CMS is Wordpress. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but basically I will need to create a new site (but they want to keep current design), move everything across to the new domain name, and 301 URL per URL? What about all the citations that the old URLs have gotten? The website is listed on Google listings/maps for some of their local keywords. Is there anyway to preserve this? Thank you all in advance.
Technical SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Sub-domain or sub-folder for a blog?
Traditional thinking suggests sub-domains are treated as separate sites and so don't pass on link juice, but I've heard mixed opinions. I'm very much a believer in sub-folders but I'm interested to hear some other opinions. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Referrals from widget domains
Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells 5000 widgets. Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ... They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains? Would it be : Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page? Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site? Miscellaneous sidebar question - Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
Keywords in Vanity URL
If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site. For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
On-Page Question
Im trying to increase value to specific pages by putting history, and additional images. Will copying snippets from other sites negatively affect me? Should the content be re-written completely?
Technical SEO | | Anest0