Subdomain vs Main Domain Penalties
-
We have a client who's main root.com domain is currently penalized by Google, but the subdomain.root.com is appearing very well. We're stumped - any ideas why?
-
Extremely helpful insight Marie - I will be contacting you directly soon.
It appears that the duplicate content you've found (and other dupe content we've found) is actually our content that other sites have repurposed. Seems like Google has determined our site as the culprit, so this would be an issue we need to address - the only thought that comes to mind right away is adding an 'Author' tag, then start working on what appears to be a hefty cleanup project, something that looks like you are an expert on and will most likely be working directly with you in the near future!
The 2nd level pages that have little content and lots of links are 'noindex,follow' but I'm nervous about the number of these tags throughout our site which could be seen as spammy to a search engine. Of note, the 2nd level page section you have found ranks quite well since it is a subdomain which is interesting. Our suspicion is that since we made the 404 (200 success) error that Google detected on Dec. 9, 2011, we have been on some sort of Google 'watch-list' and any little thing we do incorrectly that they find, we immediately are penalized.
The homepage description of our company is reused on industry directories that we are listed on, so perhaps we must consider re-writing our description to be unique, and adding more content to the homepage would be a good thing and is certainly easily doable.
-
You have some significant duplicate content issues with www.ides.com. There is not a lot of text on your home page and what is there is duplicated in many places across the web.
Your second level pages are all just links. I would noindex, follow these.
I looked at two inner pages:
http://plastics.ides.com/generics/6/alphamethylstyrene-ams - extremely thin content
Here is a Google search for text I copied from the styrene-acrylonitrile page. There are 247 pages that use this opening sentence.
My guess is that this is indeed a Panda issue. But please know that I've only just taken a quick look so I can't say for sure. What doesn't make sense is that your traffic drops don't happen on Panda dates which really should be the case if it was Panda.
Panda definitely can affect just one part of a site (such as a root and not a subdomain). I would work on making these pages completely unique and also noindexing the thin pages.
-
Thank you Marie,
We 301 redirect any traffic going to root.com to www.root.com, and any content that we moved from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com has been completely removed from www.root.com. There doesn't appear to be any duplicate content between the two. There is some duplicate content that we treat with canonicals on subdomain.root.com - very small portion of total pages (less than 1%).
As for your other questions, no warnings in WMT. Robots txt file looks clean, canonicals are in place correctly, and no accidental non-indexing that we know of.
Here is the actual site that might help to look at:
http://www.ides.com
http://plastics.ides.com/materials
http://www.ides.com/robots.txt -
I think the answer here depends on whether or not you have actually been penalized and why the site is dropping out of the SERPS. Do you have a warning in WMT? If not, then you're probably not penalized.
It's unlikely to be Penguin because Penguin did not refresh lately. Similarly, Panda did not refresh on the days you mentioned. So, it's not likely a penalty but rather some type of site structure issue.
Is there duplicate content between the subdomain and the root? If so, then Google will choose one as the owner and not show the other prominently. Any issues with robots.txt? Are the canonicals set correctly? Any chance of accidental noindexing?
-
Subdomains and root domains are not necessarily always owned by the same person and therefore will not always be given the same penalties. As Scott mentioned, they are seen as different sites.
e.g. If I create a new WordPress account and create me.wordpress.com and then build a black hat site which gets penalized, this is not going to affect you.wordpress.com or www.wordpress.com.
-
Thank you all for your insight - good stuff, but still stumped.
Here's everything we know that might help point out why the main domain (ie www.root.com) was penalized by Google. We redirect root.com to www.root.com with a 301 redirect, and it is setup this way in Google Webmaster Tools too.
December 9, 2011 - the site's 404 error page was incorrectly setup as a 200, resulting in a quick bloat of 1 million plus pages. The website dropped from Google immediately. The error page was correctly setup 2 days later. The site still appeared in Google's index via site: query. However the site didn't reappear in Google's SERPs until May 2, 2012.
October 25, 2012 - the website again drops from Google for an unknown reason. We then moved a significant portion of content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com. Pages from subdomain.root.com began appearing within 3 days as high they appeared previously on Google. From December 9, 2011 throughout this entire time we were correcting any errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools on a daily basis.
February 26, 2013 - The website yet again is dropped from Google, the subdomain.root.com continues to appear and rank well.
Due to moving most of the content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com, the index for www.root.com from October 2012 dropped from 142,000 slowly to an average of 21,400 ending at today's 4,230. However this index count fluctuates greatly every few days (probably due to moving content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com).
Of note, the site is NOT a content farm, but legitimate unique technical content that is hosted for hundreds of clients.
Again any ideas are most welcome!
-
From my understanding subdomains are considered completely separate from root domains unless you have a 301 redirect or conical that tells search engines you want them to consider the root or the subdomain to be the same; for example, http://www.yourdomain.com (subdomain) points to http://yourdomain.com
Therefore, you could have a subdomain out rank a root domain, or in your case a root domain penalized and the subdomain continue to rank well. The fact that they share an IP address shouldn't affect all the domains under that IP as many websites are on shared hosting which use the same IP address.
-
This isn't necessarily surprising. Penalties and negative ranking algorithms can be applied at a page level, a subdomain level, a root domain level, etc.
For example, HubPages used subdomains to help escape from a Panda slap.
Another example: Google placed a manual penalty on a single page of BBC's website.
-
hmmm...
do they point to the same IP address?
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
-
New domain wipes out domain authority
A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain). Specifics are:
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti
old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk So basically it seems like we're starting again from scratch with the new domain and all the SEO from the old domain has been lost? Have we done it wrong?0 -
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
One server, two domains - robots.txt allow for one domain but not other?
Hello, I would like to create a single server with two domains pointing to it. Ex: domain1.com -> myserver.com/ domain2.com -> myserver.com/subfolder. The goal is to create two separate sites on one server. I would like the second domain ( /subfolder) to be fully indexed / SEO friendly and have the robots txt file allow search bots to crawl. However, the first domain (server root) I would like to keep non-indexed, and the robots.txt file disallowing any bots / indexing. Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to tackle this one? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Dave1000 -
Does a sub-domain benefit a domain...
I have seen some mixed comment as the whether a sub-domain would benefit from the authority built up by its domain... but does a domain benefit from a sub-domain?
Technical SEO | | Switch_Digital0 -
Does the page authority matter if the main domain is A high PR??
Hi Guys, Some advice and help here would be great please! I have a web agency that has been building some links for our website, the web agency have built some links that have a page rank of 7 on the domain itself, but the our link is on the inner pages of that domain.. So I guess what I am asking is does is matter or can it still help if our links are on the inner pages of the hight pr domain and not on the homepage?? Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090 -
Changing preferred domain
My company has an international website, and because of a technical issue visitors in one of our main countries cannot visits the "www" version of our site. Currently, the www version is our preferred domain - and the non www redirects to that page. To solve this problem, I was thinking of proposing the following and would greatly appreciate any feedback! (Note: If you answered my www vs. non www question, thanks - this is a follow up) 1. Set non www site as the preferred version 2. Redirect from www to non www 3. Contact our current links and ask them to change to without “www” 4. Change canonical URLs to without “www”
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Google Penalty?
Hi, I have recently been asked to help www.mycanvas.ie I have a feeling they have a google penalty. All their Google Keywords have literally dropped out of the Google SERP but they are still shown on Yahoo SERP. I recently did a site:www.mycanvas.ie and the pages are still in google index. The only thing that comes to mind is that the site owner submitted to 380 web directories over a period of 2 months with http://www.directorymaximizer.com/ do you think this could be causing the problem with google? Advise and suggestions are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0