Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
-
Hi,
I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) .
Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain.
Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation?
any help is appreciated!
-
Thanks for the advise Carson!
-
Firstly, I wouldn't worry about your customers creating "low-quality links" unless your customers are exclusively spammers. Low authority links and spam links are two very different things in Google's eyes.
If the links point to pages that a user could not see without logging in, simply use a meta robots noindex to ensure the pages won't appear in search results. This isn't especially critical, since the page would be unlikely to appear in results anyway, but you can follow the best practice of blocking content behind a wall if you're worried about it.
If you do have a lot of customers running sites Google might consider spammy, let me know and we'll talk about it from there. Otherwise you don't need to worry.
-
Hi Nakul,
Thanks for the reply.
Sorry I wasn't a little more specific in my initial question. Anyhow our secure site is not at all the same as our public site. The secure site is used by our customers to access their accounts and use our applications. An example would be a click-to-call. If one of our customers uses our click to call service on every page of their website, then we will have several links from that customer's site back to our secure site. My concern is that this could be negatively impacting our public site since both use the same root domain.
Any thoughts on whether or not this could be a problem?
Thanks again for your help!
-
Are the URLs, pages/filenames 100% in sync between the secure subdomain and the main/public site ? If that's the case (and if it makes sense, you add a canonical on your secure.subdomain.com to public.subdomain.com pages). This way your secure.subdomain.com will not get indexed in the SERPS and will act as a 301 redirect.
P.S. Only do this if the pages are 100% in SYNC and the only difference is price etc. This way only 1 version of the pages get indexed. Users linking to your secure site will NOT get redirected, they will still see the secure site. But when the bots follow the link, they will see the canonical link as a strong directive not to index this page but your public equivalent of the same page.
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
-
Should I worry that thousands of spam sites are linking to me?
I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google. Should I be worried about this? spam-websites.png?1505218483
Technical SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
Should a sub domain be a separate property in the Search Console?
We're launching a blog on a sub-domain of a corp site (blog.corpsite.com). We already have corpsite.com set up in the Search Console. Should I set up a separate property for this sub-domain in the Search Console (WMT) in order to manage it? Is it necessary? Thanks, JM
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Moz showing 404 error on one of my sites
I have a problem. Everything seems to be ok, but moz shows a HTTP code of 404 for http://www.centralevapeurguide.com and I don't really know why. All my others websites return 200 but this one return 404. And obviously, only this website don't want to rank in google.. Thanks for your help. Sebastian
Technical SEO | | sebagorka0 -
Pages Linking to Sites that Return 404 Error
We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
Does Domain Mapping Leak Link Juice?
Hi everyone As per previous posts, we are in the process of setting up a new sideline to the business and after taking great advice from you guys, we have bought a new domain - which is fuelsos.co.uk - To save on hosting fees, I have created a subdirectory on our main site at http://lockcity.co.uk/fuelsos/ which is in the process of being mapped to fuelsos.co.uk (will take affect in next 24hrs) My question is, am I leaking link juice from my main site doing this? or should I look at buying seperate hosting? Many thanks, Abi
Technical SEO | | LockCity0 -
Linking root domains and youtube
All of my competitors have high linking root domains from youtube and our isn't showing up although we have 1.5 million views to youtube. I tried adding our URL to the videos but it hasn't recognized as a linking root domain. What should I do?? There's a ton of SEO juice here I want to tap into! watch?v=GTXFRTY4CCA&list=UUOcfF9LAHKedNSyk-gk5xDw&index=28
Technical SEO | | tonymartin0 -
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 -
Site links -> anchor text and blocking
1.Does anyone know where google pulls that anchor text for the organic site links? -- Is there a way to manipulate the anchor text of the sitelinks to get our more important pages to stick out more (capitalization, punctuation etc.) 2. If i block a few of my sitelinks from showing will goolge replace it with a new sitelink or will i be left with fewer? Thanks! Srs
Technical SEO | | Morris770