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.
Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
-
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
-
So there were no external links pointing to the subdomain admin.site.com ? If that's the case you could probably just noindex/nofollow the thing or let it 404. You could write an .htaccess rule to rewrite the domain name, but it's actually probably not worth it now that I think about it. The exception, of course, is if the subdomain had external links pointed to it.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure how feasible it is to redirect all of those urls. I know I could use regex but I just terminated the server that admin.site.com lived on so I can't access a robots.txt file anymore. Could I simply do a generic redirect admin.site.com -> site.com?
The subdomain was the same site and domain.
Thanks.
-
Okay, so the situation here is a little unclear, but the solution should be pretty straightforward.
If the admin.site.com was different from the original site domain, simply noindex/nofollow all of the pages on that domain. I recommend this over a robots.txt rule because it will actually remove them from the index. You can add a disallow all rule in robots.txt later once the site is completely noindexed.
If the admin.site.com was the same domain, I'd recommend redirecting all of those pages to the new URLs again and then launching a noindex/nofollow version blocked with robots.txt, though I'm not sure why it needs to exist for reference. If the subdomain was different from the old site you could also probably just noindex/nofollow all of it without the redirect. It's not best practice, but it's not that big a deal.
Hope this helps to answer.
-
If you took website down, you don't have to really do anything. Go to search console, do fetch as google on old admin subdomain, so google understands that it's not there anymore, and then just wait. Google will take those backlinks down.
-
The other thing I should note is that these site links do not show in Google when searching for the topic. I'm only seeing reported back links because the admin.site.com subdomain was blocked from Google crawling it for search results. Not sure if that makes a difference.
-
It says I can only demote 100 links, I need to demote upwards of 40,000 since the admin.site.com basically mirrored the actual site.
Now I'm a little confused.
I took the old site down, so I can use a robots.txt file there anymore.
So how can I disallow the entire admin subdomain and stop reporting back links?
-
I see. Read my response below and just use meta robots. it will help you out.
If you want to deindex those backlinks, you also can look into Google Search Console's demoting tool, but i don't think it's necessary.
-
Don't do that, disallow in robots.txt will NOT resolve indexing issue! What you need to use is meta robots. Noindex, nofollow. Watch this WBF on this subject:
-
Thanks
-
Hi there. Thanks for your response.
The pages exist on the new site, but the subdomain should have never been indexed. I noticed the back links in Google Console initially then confirmed with SEO Power Suite.
Basically we had site.com, then created a brand new site and migrated content over to newsite.com with 301 redirects from the old site. Then we wanted to keep the old site up for reference so we put it at admin.site.com. That is where all the 40,000 back links were coming from, admin.site.com, the old site.
There is no reason for us to redirect admin.site.com since the original articles were properly redirected. I guess however some how when the old site was taken down, Google must have indexed it still at the subdomain and counted those as backlinks.
-
Just make sure you add a robots.txt to the subdomain with
User-agent: * Disallow: / Or if the old site is not needed anymore, redirect the subdomain to your main domain and remove the site.
-
Hi there.
So, all the pages, from which those backlinks are coming from are non-existent anymore? have they been redirected? do they return 404s? Also, how did you find them? in Google Search Console or another tool?
So, if you found it in Google Search Console, and the original pages indeed have been removed and properly redirected, then it's just time delay by GSC. Otherwise (if those pages are crawlable), you should fix it.
Hope this makes sense.
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
-
Web 2.0 Backlinks
Hi Normal Web 2.0 websites like Wordpress.com, blogger.com have very High DA and PA. But when we create a subdomain, DA and PA falls to 1 as Google treats subdomain as new websites. Does it make any sense then to get backlinks from web 2.0 websites? will it help in Google rankings?
Link Building | | aliasgarbabat1234567890 -
Backlinks from translated content
Hello, We have quite a few articles "out there" that give us backlinks. We were thinking of also translating the content and submitting it to local content websites, so it can provide us with more backlinks. The main questions here, will this content be recognized as the same content as the English version? Also, being in another language, some of the anchor text might not hit the English keyword. Not sure how Google sees it. Any advise on the matter? thx!!
Link Building | | PangeaLangs0 -
Where can I find where to submit my website to?
Hi there, I am currently reading and learning about backlinks and I find myself stumped as to where I can submit my website to. I understand the logic's and methods for backlinks but just don't know how to find good quality websites to submit my website to. I appreciate any help in advance. Jay
Link Building | | VoodooCreativeLtd0 -
Backlinks through dofollow commenting
I'm interested in building backlinks to my photography business site by leaving good, engaging comments on other photographers' DoFollow blogs. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the effort? Through a little research, I've managed to locate more than 40 dofollow photographer blogs that have a domain authority of 35+. The idea is to take an hour or so a week to leave 10-20 comments on their blog posts. Would you consider this a good strategy? I rank on the first and second page of most of my keywords that I'm working on, but I want to rank 1st or 2nd on them. I used the keyword finder tool on google adwords to find the keywords that are the most searched for in my area. Surprisingly the competition is not large, so I'm fairly comfident I can get there. I've already optimized my site substantially and I'm looking into link building. Thoughts?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
How to index Backlinks Fast in Google!
I Made few backlinks with my keyword but they are not getting index and it has been for 15 days. Do you have any idea that will help me out to solve this problem and also to index back links quickly.
Link Building | | rohitdeveloper0 -
Trading Backlinks a good idea?
New to the "backlinking" party. Wondering if its 'good practice' to trade links with other websites within a like-industry. We've been receiving a lot of emails from other websites asking us to trade links. Is this a good link building practice anymore? Thanks!
Link Building | | asa-php0 -
Why do we need proxy to so Backlinks?
Does Google knows the IP addresses that the backlinks are created from? if i create 200 backlinks for my site without proxies will google ban my site because it will look like i a the one who create all the backlinks? May i ask how many proxies do you guys need to create around 200 backlinks per day? If i already use the proxies today Can i use the same set of proxies to create backlinks tomorrow? THanks
Link Building | | locoto00071 -
Frustrated with spammy backlinks from competitors
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like... "I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork." I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k. Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords. What can I do to compete with this junk?
Link Building | | jgower0