Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?
-
I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information.
All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain.
Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen.
Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy):
href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143"
I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO.
Any advice?? Thank you!
-
My understanding is this:
If its a duplicate, as in a copy and paste article, then Google will eventually de-index the duplication and keep the original article.
In your clients case though, they are providing the source links, so google doesnt label it as duplicate content, but sees it as syndicated content.
Look at news sources for example. The same article syndicated on multiple sites are all indexed and stay indexed. (this is the case for your clients site)
What i would tell your client is that fresh and unique content on their site is key for SEO. By syndicating articles, it doesn't provide any benefits for SEO in terms of unique and fresh content, so the operation is pointless unless its for user experience only.
Give them an example, say its the same as giving away articles to other websites, and then reusing them on their site as "second hand" articles. Just because its word press doesn't mean its any different to any other website out there.
Good luck!
Greg
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
-
SEO's Structuring Your Work Week
Hi I wanted some feedback on how other SEO's structure their time. I feel as though I'm falling into the trap of fire fighting with tasks rather than working on substantial projects... I don't feel as though I'm being as effective as I could be. Here's our set up - Ecommerce site selling thousands of products - more of a generalist with 5 focus areas. 2 x product/merchandising teams - bring in new products, write content/merchandise products Web team - me (SEO), Webmaster, Ecommcerce manager Studio - Print/Email marketing/creative/photography. A lot of my time is split between working for the product teams doing KWD research, briefing them on keywords to use, checking meta. SEO Tasks - Site audits/craws, reporting Blogs - I try and do a bit as I need it so much for SEO, so I've put a content/social plan together but getting a lot of things actioned is hard... I'm trying to coordinate this across teams Inbetween all that, I don't have much time to work on things I know are crucial like a backlink/outreach plan, blog/user guide/content building etc. How do you plan your time as an SEO? Big projects? Soon I'm going to pull back from the product optimisation & try focussing on category pages, but for an Ecommerce site they are extremely difficulty to promote. Just asking for opinions and advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey3 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Wordpress Photography Site + eCommerce Plugin
Anyone know of good photography sites set up on Wordpress with an eCommerce plugin used for selling photos or services? Just looking for ideas. I've found good referrals in the Moz archives for Wordpress eCommerce plugins. Now I'm looking for WP photography sites employing eCommerce. Thanks for sharing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
How can we improve the seo on our site?
Hello everyone. I have been reading through this site for a while and tried to put everything together that I have learned so far. Would any of you mind looking at our site and providing any pointers or areas we can still improve on or areas I completely missed. I appreciate any feedback you can give! Our site is faithology.com Thanks again! Brandon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Subdomain vs root which is better for SEO
We run a network of sites that we are considering consolidating into one main site with multiple categories. Which would be better having each of the "topics / site" reside in subdomains or as a sub-folder off of the root? Pros and cons of each would be great. Thanks, TR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DisMedia0 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0