When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain.

Thanks

[vtmoz]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for the response. I have a confusion with your answer. Could you please clarify?

> How can they affect your rankings if you don't have pages optimized for these queries on your main domain?

• As Google considers sub domains as different websites, related traffic is getting taken away from main website. It it don't hurt, at least main website get benefited with receiving this traffic IMO.

> Is your goal here getting relevant traffic to your website or ranking for more keywords with your main domain?

• Both. I think these are vice-versa. If we rank main website for more keywords, relevant traffic n will be increased automatically right?.

All I would like to know is, if our website traffic increased by 30% for branded & relevant keywords, will it benefit our website in rankings?, especially for non-branded organic search.

[Igor.Go]

I don't see the problem. How can they affect your rankings if you don't have pages optimized for these queries on your main domain?

Is your goal here getting relevant traffic to your website or ranking for more keywords with your main domain?

In the first case, you're good.

In the second case, there may be a conflict if you decide to add the page you want to rank for those keywords to your page. The search engine will see your subdomain as the separate website.

I really hope you're more interested in traffic though.