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.
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
-
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages?
If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder...
-
Do we need to link to example.com from /blog?
-
Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog?
-
Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
-
-
np, you don't want to assume things.
this is what Matt Cutts said in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk
It is still advisable that most websites out there rather rely on pages and subdirectories for regular pages and content than subdomains, but nowadays it is a highly subjective thing, basically suit yourself on it.
But keep in mind the simple formula for decision making: Pros v Cons... which outweighs which and why.
subdomains can certainly cause you, the owner and web dev, more work and impose a higher "moving parts" risk under most typical circumstances where /page is a viable alternative.
also look at these
https://moz.com/community/q/link-juice-from-subdomain
https://moz.com/community/q/getting-mixed-signals-regarding-how-google-treats-subdomains
-
Thanks for the response.
We have 6 sub-domains like blog, etc. Our blog is a sub-domain but configured as example.com/blog (wordpress). Others are left as same. sub-domain.com, etc. We have thousands of visits on these sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. So, we are not sure whether these will be treated as individual websites by Google or all together as same website. If they treat as individual website, will there be any link juice passing from and to domain and sub-domains? And my doubt is, what's the best way to link these sub-domains from our domain. I have gone through some posts saying too many links from sub-domain to domain may turn as spam for Google.
-
You really need to understand these terms correctly
sub.domain.com < this is a subdomain
domain.com/page < this is a page and it could also be a folder of your site depending on your config
The answer to your question depends on the need here. Why are you needing subdomains? for multi-lingual site? e.g. us.xyz.com or FR.xyz.com? or just for something like a shop or blog and you are having a debate between making them into a page or a subdomain?
I recommend you spend more time studying what you are attempting to accomplish here. Subdomains should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, each subdomain is treated separately for ranking purposes than pages on the top domain
so domain.com will be treated as one site by google and sub.domain.com will be a whole nother page receiving next to no authority or juice or anything from the main domain short of your internal links. I would roll with a page wherever applicable and possible instead of a subdomain.
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain?
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain? For context, whilst doing link gap analysis I've found our competitors are listed on local government directories such as getsurrey.co.uk and miltonkeynes.co.uk. Whilst these aren't seen as spam directories, it's still highly unlikely we'll receive much traffic through them. The links they provide to our domain have the nofollow tag. So I wonder whether there's any other benefit to investing the time in creating these listings? Would be interested to hear your thoughts Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Opera-Care1 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?
ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?0 -
Best way to block a sub-domain from being indexed
Hello, The search engines have indexed a sub-domain I did not want indexed its on old.domain.com and dev.domain.com - I was going to password them but is there a best practice way to block them. My main domain default robots.txt says :- Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml global User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /?0 -
Best Practice for Inter-Linking to CCTLD brand domains
Team, I am wondering what people recommend as best SEO practice to inter-link to language specific brand domains e.g. : amazon.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro
amazon.de
amazon.fr
amazon.it Currently I have 18 CCTLDs for one brand in different languages (no DC). I am linking from each content page to each other language domain, providing a link to the equivalent content in a separate language on a different CCTLD doamin. However, with Google's discouragement of site-wide links I am reviewing this practice. I am tending towards making the language redirects on each page javascript driven and to start linking only from my home page to the other pages with optimized link titles. Anyone having any thoughts/opinions on this topic they are open to sharing? /Thomas0