Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it possible to redirect the main www. domain - but keep a subdomain active?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer...
Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com.
Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com. I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc.
Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist.
If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority? On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active.
Make sense? Any answers?
Thanks everyone...
-
Hi - thank you for your responses and sorry for my very late reply.
Appreciate your input on this. Ruth, the reason for this being in a consideration was because the company wanted to re-brand their customer-facing site (changing to newwebsite.com) but keep oldwebsite.com as a corporate site.
The issue of course is that, unless we did a complete domain transfer, we would lose some of the fantastic rankings that have been built up over two years of hard work. This got me thinking about whether I could give them both, i.e. create subdomain.oldwebsite.com even though the main site has been redirected and transferred.
Having thought about that, I wanted to know if anyone had tested this as it seemed like a potential loop-hole, whereby you might be able to have subdomain.oldwebsite.com and newwebsite.com both piggy-backing off the same DA. But, as you mentioned that DA doesn't transfer that well to subdomains, I guess this may be one reason why.
Thankfully, this strange scenario was avoided, as I finally managed to convince them to start a new corporate site on a .net or .org. The corporate site doesn't need to rank particularly, so I got my #1 solution anyway. The subdomain idea I posted above was a potential backup plan at best, as the CEO didn't look like budging for a while!
Thanks again - much appreciated! Incidentally, I have another question posted here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-not-indexing-xml-sitemap-images. It's really killing me, so I hope somebody can offer some assistance!
Cheers,
Mark
-
DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.
It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.
You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.
-
I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.
An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.
I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.
Just my thoughts.
-
Thanks for your response, Allen - much appreciated.
I probably wasn't clear in my original message that I am specifically interested in what happens to Domain Authority in that scenario - and wondered if anyone had tested this. Hence felt a web dev / IT forum would be the wrong place.
So I thought it might be possible to do this technically, for the reasons you mentioned. But what happens to the DA?
Let's say you redirect www.example.com to www.newsite.com. www.newsite.com then takes over from www.example.com in the rankings (done this several times and it's been near seamless).
But, I then want to set up a subdomain on example.com AFTER I have redirected www.example.com. Surely, that subdomain would retain some of that DA and thus have an unfair advantage. All of a sudden, I could engineer it so that subdomain.example.com AND www.newsite.com rank alongside each other.
Not tried this before so fascinated to see if the subdomain would rank - or whether because it's on a redirected site, it would not.
Cheers!
-
Hey guys,
Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.
What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com
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
-
Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Spanish website indexed in English, redirect to spanish or english version if i do a new website design?
Hi MOZ users, i have this problem. We have a website in Spanish Language but Google crawls it on English (it is not important the reasons). We re made the entire website and now we are planning the move. The new website will have different language versions, english, spanish and portuguese. Somebody tells me that we have to redirect the old urls (crawled on english) to the new english versions, not to the spanish (the real language of the firsts). Example: URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language English version. the other option will be redirect to the spanish new version, which the visitor is waiting to find. URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language Spanish version. What do you think? Which is the better option?
Web Design | | NachoRetta0 -
302 redirects, canonicalise or redirect (301)?
Hey Guys, I am fairly new to 'technical' SEO as I was lucky enough in my old role to have technical expertise in the team for things like this, now I am learning myself and it is a slow and painful process, so your expertise is soooo much appreciated! My I.T. dept say that I have 3 instances on my website where the Hybris platform is creating a 302 redirect automatically - the first: URL doesn't exist - Hybris creates a temp 302 - the system does not create case sensitive url's | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0180/brand/CHANEL | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 | | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0015/brand/Giorgio-Armani | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
Web Design | | eLab_London
| http://www.example.fr/fr/Example/marken/0507/brand/lancome | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 | I believe these are being redirected due to the fact that capital letters are being created in the url. Multi-lingual redirects I have a German and French version of my site and whenever any switches from one URL to the other using our language selector a 302 is created. Dynamic URL elements Dynamic url elements and special characters are being created in the URL, I am not sure where this is happening, but my I.T. department would like me to go and see whether this is something that can be created by a browser. If anyone has any similar problems or have any advice or insights even, I would love to hear from you! Thanks 🙂0 -
Learning Center on Subdomain or New Domain
Hello, With so much emphasis for SEO to develop unique, information content I am working to build out a "Learning Center' for one of my clients in the finance industry. As you can guess, this is quite a competitive space and their rankings have become somewhat stagnant so we are looking for new ways to develop original, share-worthy content for the site. So my question is, in order for them to retain the most SEO value should we develop this on a subdomain such as learning.website.com or a new domain altogether. Note: We do not want to develop this under the current site domain as it we want o only post informational content & courses and keep these pieces outside of the "sales" side of their website. Therefore, I thought the subdomain would be the best bet so that we would retain the most value for SEO... however, some of my colleagues disagree. Some vote it should be within a directory under website.com. Some say a new site & domain altogether. My vote is to place this under a subdomain such as http://learning.website.com with the idea that the site's authority will influence the root http://website.com. The argument I was provided against the subdomain was: "essentially adding a subdomain would mean you're sort of starting over again in terms of building authority. adding a folder will ride the coattails off the already established authority." Lastly, for clarification, the current domain is set up as http://website.com so the subdomain would be http://learning.website.com, the directory would be set up as http://website.com/learning/ and a whole new domain would be http://newwebsite.com. This is for a Wordpress site. Thoughts? All feedback is much appreciated!
Web Design | | TinaMumm0 -
Subdomains, duplicate content and microsites
I work for a website that generates a high amount of unique, quality content. This website though has had development issues with our web builder and they are going to separate the site into different subdomains upon launch. It's a scholarly site so the subdomains will be like history and science and stuff. Don't ask why aren't we aren't using subdirectories because trust me I wish we could. So we have to use subdomains and I'm wondering a couple questions. Will the duplication of coding, since all subdomains will have the same design and look, heavily penalize us and is there any way around that? Also if we generate a good amount of high quality content on each site could we link all those sites to our other site as a possible benefit for link building? And finally, would footer links, linking all the subdirectories, be a good thing to put in?
Web Design | | mdorville0 -
Site Activity, SEO, and behind login
I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on: How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?
Web Design | | uwaim20120 -
WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy domain mapping help
We set up a WP blog that's hosted through GoDaddy. For various reasons, we purchased a URL to use to get through the technical build and set up and are trying to map that to a subdomain of our company website. (We can't host it on our own server, unfortunately). My question is: for WP blogs hosted via WP you can buy a domain mapping upgrade and I'm trying to find a similar plugin that could offer the same thing that would apply to our GoDaddy hosting and point to our subdomain (GD apparently doesn't offer the domain mapping). Anyone have any thoughts, please?
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
Parked Domain or Redirect
Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account. If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?
Web Design | | hfranz0