Need advice on having customer stores running on my subdomain
-
We have an online store product and we're working on the SEO for our new domain (foo.com in this example.) Our customers have the ability to change the domain of their store but many of them will likely stick with the subdomains we give them (store1.foo.com)
We could potentially have thousands of stores soon using our subdomain. Each of these stores will have a very small link at the bottom to our own domain but other than this, the content is completely user-generated and not under our control.
Are there risks/problems associated with this type of strategy? If so, could we perhaps avoid them by using robots.txt to block entire site until they change to their own domain?
TIA,
Sean
-
First off, the biggest concern will be spammers. Use a good captcha system like reCaptcha or OpenCaptcha to control who signs up, although charging money is the best way to keep them out.
Second, don't manipulate the anchor text at the bottom of the user generated stores, just use your brand name.
Third, I wouldn't be hugely concerned about it being a subdomain. Think about all the spam on blogspot and wordpress.com. You won't enjoy the authority status at the beginning that lends them some buffer against the spam, but if you control it at the beginning you should build up your site enough that you can weather some crap making it's way through.
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
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | WillyGx0 -
Advice for rapidly declining ranking-- can an old indexed sitemap cause this?
Hi Everyone, Today, I woke up to a dramatic page rank decline (nearly 20 positions) for a client's website (eacoe.org). When I looked in Webmaster tools, I noticed that the site was just indexed yesterday by Google (a request that the webmaster had submitted back in April of this year). Would this re-indexing event have caused the sharp decline? In Webmaster Tools, I don't see many errors (one 404 error that we are planning on fixing). I likewise see no Manual Actions/ penalties brought up by Google about our site. My first concern is that the re-indexing led to rank decline, but I'm not entirely sure if I should be focusing on something else. And if it is the re-indexing, what are there any recommended steps of attack? Thanks for your help! -Bruce
Technical SEO | | dynedge0 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
I really need some help with Magento and Duplicate Page Content results I;m getting
Hi, We use Magento for our eCommerce platform and I'm getting a number of duplicate page content results. It mainly concerns the duplicate page content errors for our category pages. Firstly It seems like the product type and filter options highlighted in the picture are causing duplicate page content Also one particularity category is getting a lot from duplicate page content errors , http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-all-products I understand that this category page is using duplicate pages of other category pages so I set this to exclude them from the site map but it looks likes its till being picked up? I've attached the csv file showing these errors as well. - > Any help would be massively appreciated Thanks filter.png moz-tidy-books-uk-crawl_issues-01-OCT-2014.csv
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Effects of significant cross linking between subdomains
A client has noticed in recent months that their traffic from organic search has been declining, little by little. They have a large ecommerce site with several different categories of product - each product type has its own subdomain. They have some big megamenus going on, and the end result is that if you look in their Webmaster Tools for one of their subdomains, under Links to your Site, it says they have nearly 22 million links from their own domain! Client is wondering if this is what is causing the decline in traffic and wondering whether to change the whole structure of their site. Interested to hear the thoughts of the community on this one!
Technical SEO | | helga730 -
Instead of a 301, my client uses a 302 to custom 404
I've found about 900 instances of decommissioned pages being redirected via 302 to a 404 custom page, even when there's a comparable page elsewhere on the site or on a new subdomain. My recommendation would be to always do a 301 from the legacy page to the new page, but since they're are so many instances of this 302->404 it seems to be standard operating procedure by the dev team. Given that at least one of these pages has links coming from 48 root domains, wouldn't it obviously be much better to 301 redirect it to pass along that equity? I don't get why the developers are doing this, and I have to build a strong case about what they're losing with this 302->404 protocol. I'd love to hear your thoughts on WHY the dev team has settled on this solution, in addition to what suffers as a result. I think I know, but would love some more expert input.
Technical SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
.co what is it? Do I need it? Does Google hate it?
Do .com rank better then .co? I don't know much about .co so I'm just looking for some insight! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | christinarule0