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.
Sub-Domain Google Search Nested under main Domain?
-
Hello,
I have a strange issue that I have not come across before:My subdomain is: michigan.dogdaycare.com.
Some of the Keyword searches show our subdomain being nested under the main domain for Google searches instead of being indexed individually.
Example search term: Dogtopia Bloomfield
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+bloomfield
-This will show two subdomain links nested under the main domain
Example search term: Dogtopia Birmingham
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+birmingham
-This shows the subdomain showing correctly in searches and not nested.
Any idea as to how to fix this?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for your advice and tips!
-
I'm wondering if you can correct this with link building. Your domain has some decent authority, so it's probably a trust of the primary domain over the subdomain in this case.
In contrast, I have a subdomain that generated quite a bit of editorial coverage that stands on its own in SERPs, and I believe that is because of the link profile to it.
I'll leave you with a couple ideas...
- Get rid of the button link on the michigan.dogdaycare.com page to /bloomington/ and instead, link them the other way (ie corporate page to business listing on subdomain).
- Also, on the corporate domain, if you do any internal linking, switch them to the Michigan subdomain URL instead of /bloomfield/
- Do something to generate some inbound links to your subdomain listing, and do it without including links to anywhere on the main domain. Honestly, something as simple as Moz Local, a press release that gets picked up by some local publications, and maybe some links to that subdomain URL from some doggy daycare directories will help that, IMO.
- Moving forward, show no link love to the corporate domain page.
-
Within Webmaster Tools you could possibly exclude the subdomain pages from being listed as site links, but Google has stated they're trying to get better at associating when subdomains are similar to subfolders on a site. Rand recently discussed that aspect of it here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
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
-
Google-selected canonical: the homepage?
Hi guys,
Local Website Optimization | | Andreea-M
I checked the product pages on our website with Google Search Console (URL Inspection), and the majority appear as
"URL is not on Google"
Coverage: "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical", and
Google-selected canonical: the homepage of the website (for all product pages) Our product pages are not identical to the homepage (content-wise), besides the top menu, header and footer, so how could I use the canonical tag in this case? I wouldn't want that the product pages to be seen as duplicates of the homepage. Thanks!0 -
Google for Jobs: how to deal with third-party sites that appear instead of your own?
We have shared our company's job postings on several third-party websites, including The Muse, as well as putting the job postings on our own website. Our site and The Muse have about the same schema markup except for these differences: The Muse...
Local Website Optimization | | Kevin_P
• Lists Experience Requirements
• Uses HTML in the description with tags and other markup (our website just has plain text)
• Has a Name in JobPosting
• URL is specific to the position (our website's URL just goes to the homepage)
• Has a logo URL for Organization When you type the exact job posting's title into Google, The Muse posting shows up in Google for Jobs--not our website's duplicate copy. The only way to see our website's job posting is to type in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com". What is a good approach for getting our website's posting to be the priority in Google for Jobs? Do we need to remove postings from third-party sites? Structure them differently? Do organic factors affect which version of the job posting is shown, and if so, can I assume that our site will face challenges outranking a big third-party site?1 -
Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords
We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)
Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto0 -
I have a client in Australia that is going to set up a website that is in Chinese to service their Asian customer base (Indonesia, Singapore, HK, China). What domain should they use?
They're website is hosted on a .com.au domain. Should they host their Chinese language pages under their current domain (.com.au) using a subdirectory (i.e. /asia) or should they use another separate domain that they own that is a regular .com? Or does it really not matter?
Local Website Optimization | | 100yards1 -
How many backlinks from one domain?
How many backlinks from one domain is too many? 1? 3? 10? For example, directory listings. If you have 5 separate links to one website in lets say DMOZ (good for you!), is it really only "juicy" one time? Or each one just as awesome? What about multiple guest articles on a related website? If I had 2 or 3 articles on one website that each have different contextual links, is it just the same as if I had one article?
Local Website Optimization | | Cantor-Crane0 -
How to correctly move subdomain to subfolder (google webmaster)?
Hello, This is my first post in here 🙂 I just wondered what is the correct way to move a subdomain to subfolder? I've moved it, re-done sitemap, so that main website would include a subfolder, as they are part of one big website now (it was something like a blog on a subdomain). Subdomain now does correct 301 redirects. Submitted new sitemap to google, asked google to re-fetch the whole domain (thus subfolder should be re-fetched too, as it's part of main nav). The areas i'm in doubt: I can tell google that the domain got moved, however it is moved to the one that is already approved in the same account, but is in a subfolder, so should i do this? Or should i simply somehow erase it on webmaster? The blog was launched about a month ago, and it isn't perfectly optimized yet, it wasn't on google SERPs pretty much at all, excluding googling it straightly, and there are pretty much 0 traffic from google, almost all of it is either direct either referral, mostly social, Thanks, Pavel
Local Website Optimization | | PavelGro920 -
Virtual Offices & Google Search
United Kingdom We have a client who works from home and wants a virtual office so his clients do not know where he lives. Can a virtual office address be used on his business website pages & contact pages, in title tags and descriptions as well as Google places. The virtual office is manned at all times and phone calls will be directed to the client, the virtual office company say effectively it is a registered business address. Look forward to any helpful responses.
Local Website Optimization | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9