Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Link Building
    4. Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?

    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?

    Link Building
    4
    13
    3052
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • MMAffiliate
      MMAffiliate last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Carson-Ward
        Carson-Ward @MMAffiliate last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • MMAffiliate
          MMAffiliate @Carson-Ward last edited by

          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.

          Carson-Ward 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Carson-Ward
            Carson-Ward last edited by

            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.

            MMAffiliate 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • DmitriiK
              DmitriiK @MMAffiliate last edited by

              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.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • MMAffiliate
                MMAffiliate last edited by

                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.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • MMAffiliate
                  MMAffiliate @DmitriiK last edited by

                  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?

                  DmitriiK 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • DmitriiK
                    DmitriiK @MMAffiliate last edited by

                    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.

                    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334

                    MMAffiliate 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • DmitriiK
                      DmitriiK @MMAffiliate last edited by

                      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:

                      https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-crawlers-for-better-indexation-and-rankings-whiteboard-friday

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • MMAffiliate
                        MMAffiliate @Toddfoster last edited by

                        Thanks

                        DmitriiK 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • MMAffiliate
                          MMAffiliate @DmitriiK last edited by

                          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.

                          DmitriiK 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Toddfoster
                            Toddfoster last edited by

                            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.
                            
                            MMAffiliate 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • DmitriiK
                              DmitriiK last edited by

                              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.

                              MMAffiliate 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • 1 / 1
                              • First post
                                Last post

                              Got a burning SEO question?

                              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                              Start my free trial


                              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.

                              • See all categories

                              Related Questions

                              • Leviiii

                                slug Link redirect to subdomain?

                                redirect subdomain link building

                                Hi !
                                Im Levi new here and new in the world of SEO, please dont judge if my questions are silly. Back on the days when the site was built we thought it is a good ideea to have subdomains that together with the domain name represent our main keywords.
                                ex. https://stansted.tonorwich.uk, https://heathrow.tonorwich.uk, https://luton.tonorwich.uk, https://gatwick.tonorwich.uk. There is content on this subdomains, would it make any difference from SEO perspective if we create slugs that redirect to these subdomains? for example creating https://tonorwich.uk/taxi-minibus-vip-tesla-norwich-to-stansted that redirects to https://stansted.tonorwich.uk ? Or better create these slugs with slightly different content?
                                Any ideeas would be appreciated.
                                Thanks in advance!

                                Link Building | | Leviiii
                                0
                              • ahmad7475

                                How much time does it takes for a backlink to get registered in Google? My basketball anime website has been live since start of this week and Google has not registered any backlink.

                                So my website https://www.animedhfa.com/basketball-anime/ about basketball Anime has shown no changes in DA or backlinks. It has been 5 days perhaps since it went live.

                                Link Building | | ahmad7475
                                0
                              • wikiBudgets

                                Does iframe itself count as a backlink?

                                Our situation is similar to YouTube. We have an original content on every subpage that is genuinely useful when embedded as a widget on 3r party websites. That is why we offer an embeddable widget that shows slightly simplified version of the content - exactly like a YouTube video embedded on your blog. The embed code is simply an iframe sourcing from our subpage: <iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage"></p> </blockquote> <p>1/ Does the iframe itself pass any link value at all to the subpage?</p> <p>2/ If yes, what would be the equivalent of anchor text in iframe?</p> <p>3/ If not, will any link in the subpage pass link value from the 3rd party website to my domain/subpage?</p> <p>4/ If not, will I be punished/rewarded if I ask users to put a visible, unobfuscated link to the subpage below the iframe?</p> <blockquote style="background: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p><iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage" /><a href="wikibudgets.org/subpage">rich anchor text</a></p> </blockquote></iframe>

                                Link Building | | wikiBudgets
                                0
                              • jomosi

                                Need advice: How to replace a high-ranking pdf with a landing page -- without dropping much in rank?

                                Hi!  We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term.  We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper. Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that.  Am I right?  Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting). Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated.  (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.)  Thanks!! -John

                                Link Building | | jomosi
                                0
                              • BloggerGuy

                                Backlinks embedded in posts or backlinks in sidebar?

                                What's better? A backlink to my site, embedded into a blog post/article? Or a hardlink in the sidebar? The problem with links embedded inside articles, is that when the blog linking to me, gets updated, the articles disappear from first page and I lose the link from home page. How do you deal with this? I also read this: "The best link you can get is from a site ranking #1 for the keyword you want to rank for. It would be great to have the #1 site for a desired keyword linking me even if they are a PR 0 site." Is this right? Thx in advance.

                                Link Building | | BloggerGuy
                                0
                              • CleanEdisonInc

                                Ways to remove spammy backlinks

                                Hello everyone, I got hit with an algorithm penalty and need to start removing old backlinks ASAP. Does anyone have any good resources on how best to ask webmasters for removal? Are there any other ways to remove bad back links besides the disavow tool? (An SEO consultant I talked to said that they had a proprietary software that can remove them - is that possible?) Thanks all,

                                Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc
                                1
                              • lnietob

                                Where I can find a backlink community exchange?

                                I know is difficult but it's worth to try. I am looking for a community eager to exchange links. I am in the venue rent for weeding and conferences in London   and I would be delighted to find other people to exchange the links. At the moment my page is PR4 I have seen communities for games where they exchange anything, why don't link exchange!!!!

                                Link Building | | lnietob
                                0
                              • SirMax

                                URL shortener and backlinks

                                Are there any SEO benefits drawn from creating backlinks with Google url shortener service(especially for the very deep links) or for the do-follow link juice I have to use a complete address?

                                Link Building | | SirMax
                                0

                              Get started with Moz Pro!

                              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                              Start my free trial
                              Products
                              • Moz Pro
                              • Moz Local
                              • Moz API
                              • Moz Data
                              • STAT
                              • Product Updates
                              Moz Solutions
                              • SMB Solutions
                              • Agency Solutions
                              • Enterprise Solutions
                              Free SEO Tools
                              • Domain Authority Checker
                              • Link Explorer
                              • Keyword Explorer
                              • Competitive Research
                              • Brand Authority Checker
                              • Local Citation Checker
                              • MozBar Extension
                              • MozCast
                              Resources
                              • Blog
                              • SEO Learning Center
                              • Help Hub
                              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                              • How-to Guides
                              • Moz Academy
                              • API Docs
                              About Moz
                              • About
                              • Team
                              • Careers
                              • Contact
                              Why Moz
                              • Case Studies
                              • Testimonials
                              Get Involved
                              • Become an Affiliate
                              • MozCon
                              • Webinars
                              • Practical Marketer Series
                              • MozPod
                              Connect with us

                              Contact the Help team

                              Join our newsletter

                              Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                              Moz logo
                              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                              • Accessibility
                              • Terms of Use
                              • Privacy

                              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.