Subdomains & SEO
-
Exact match domains are great for ranking but what about domains which contain just half of the full phrase being targeted?
eg. If you owned the domain rentals.co.uk but wanted to target the search term "car rentals"
Regarding backlinks, would it be best to link back to your rentals.co.uk homepage (using anchor text "car rentals") or to one of the following:
a) www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals
b) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk
c) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals
-
Definitely
-
let us know how you go
-
Great to hear first hand Alan. Likewise, I can say that exact match domains hold a significant advantage.
I think I'm going to give the matching subdomain a shot since I don't have the exact match domain.
-
i certianly have, i am woking on a job right now, where we have done just what you are contemplating, and they are ranking 2 on bing and 5 on google for chosen keyword phrase, that is only partial match to subdomain. it definatly has an affect.
-
That seems like a pretty good indication that it's better to go with the exact match domain rather than completing it with a sub domain.
A sensible URL structure and optimized Titles and Descriptions will also help.
-
Yes, good point about domain outranking path.
I am looking at a new site that should have a fair amount of content so definitely considering the exact match.
One concern is that I can't remember seeing an exact match subdomain rank at the top of search engine results.
-
A good answer.
-
I dont think so, domian and subdomain out rank path.
i would make that choice on the amount of content i had, if i only had one page i would not go for a subdomain.
-
Wouldn't rentals.co.uk/car-rentals be better than carrentals.rentals.co.uk if adding the whole phrase?
-
Yes it would.
Exact match domain is best
then i would say exact match sub-domain
then split sub + doamin
even if its in the path its all good.
why not have carrentals.rentals.co.uk to avoid the risk.
-
Thanks guys. Just one other thing to throw into the equation, if the domain was unused and only contained half the phrase but a sub domain would be an exact match would it be worth using the subdomain?
The reason I am so interested in exact match is that I have an exact domain which outranks sites which should ordinarily be above mine.
-
I agree with Kyle's comments. Better off concentrating on building good quality links, plus don't forget about the all important content of course, keep it unique, relevant and interesting
-
Sorry i may have worded that oddly in my reply. They would certainly count as a direct match if they are in subdomains. What i was trying to stress is that Google doesn't value direct match domains as much as they use too. However, Bing and Yahoo still do.
So my suggestion was to direct your focus to other important aspects of SEO. Go with a keyword match in your URL off your base domain, focus on those back links with great anchor text, and spend plenty of time on your on-page aspects.
With all of that you will out rank any exact match domain.
-
I am not sure how sub + domain ranks in comparison to purly having the keywords in thedomain name itself, but it certainly would help.
I noted that my grammar and spelling was not that good in my explaining above, so
may recap. If you 301 the subdomain, then it will not appear in searh engines
at all, it will show the final url, and there would be no benefit.As for splitting authority, I don’t think that is true. Looking a site links for
domainname.com shows links for sub.domainname.com, I thing this shows that
search engines can tell it is the same site. -
Thanks Kyle. So direct match subdomains don't come close to exact match domains?
-
V.interesting, thanks. My only hesistation about using subdomains would be splitting the authority between the two.
But wondering in my reply to Simon about whether there are any benefit of submain + domain = search phrase?
-
For every 301 redirect you do, you lose a little link juice.
Also, from my experiences with direct match domains... in google it barely helps. However yahoo and bing still place a lot of value in it. I would focus on building relevant links and on page optimizations for your site rather than trying to get keyword matches in your domain.
-
Many thanks for both responses. My thoughts about 301'ing subdomains were the same until I recently came across a site listing their subdomain (301 to homepage) in backlinks which completed the search phrase by joining both subdomain and domain together. They rank #1 for the search term in Google. However, I have also seen them using the same anchor text linking to their homepage so this could be a legacy strategy.
Do you think submain + domain = search phrase carries any advantage?
-
If you want to rank for car rentals, i would have a seperate page for it, i would not 301 back to homepage there would be on no use of having a different url in teh first place. it would be in fact leak a bit of link juice as 301's leak link juice.
If you havge a lot of content for car rentals i would go for the sub domain. I have always prefered sub domains to sub directories but 2 recent development have pushed me further that way.
1. google WMT now count links from sub directories to a root directories as internal links and assume ownership of sub domains simply if you own the root domain, unless the sub domain has been verified but somone else.2. Site links for a root domain include pages from sub domains.
In my expirences link juice flows freely from root to sub domains and back if you have stronng internal linking structure from sub domains to root domains and back..
-
Hi Marty
Rand did a Blog post on this back in October, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited
Historically, exact match domains appear to have proved great for rankings (high correlation, though not necessarily causation). It seems to be the general expectation, which I agree with, that recently and moving forwards, exact match domains won't have such a high weighting by the search engine algorithms, Google in particular.
If you can get hold of an exact match domain, then great, though not necessary if the website does it's job well and has all the usuals, such as great content and high quality relevant inbound links.
An example to build confidence; Google 'car rental insurance' you'll see that the 1st result is www.insurance4carhire.com which doesn't have the term 'rental' in the domain name.
Backlinks; naturally looking is usually the best policy. Certainly some to the homepage, some deep links too, usually to the main product pages. Depends on which pages you feel to be the most important to your visitors.
301'ing backlinks and subdomains; not advisable and usually some of that valuable link juice is lost. Best to have all or as many as possible pointing to the ultimate destination page.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
I would go after backlinks with the anchor text of "car rentals" back to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals. It will increase your domain authority and page authority without the risk of splitting your links across domains.
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
-
Changing Ecommerce Site Display style will it impact on seo & performance?
Hello Expert, Do redesign website will affect seo? At initial level drop in visitor, pageviews? Actually I am redesign my ecommerce site but we are not changing 1) url's 2) we are not changing content 3) we are not changing server 4) we are not changing navigation. We are changing display style at homepage, category page, subcategory page, product page, checkout step. So still it will impact on website visitors & pageviews? 2) How google will react on int 3) How visitor will react? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
Should we change our URLs for SEO benefit?
Hi, I'm currently covering a maternity marketing role at i-escape and one our main objectives is to increase organic traffic to the website. i-escape has a selection of hand-picked boutique hotels, villas, lodges, guesthouses and apartments for people to discover and book. At the moment each hotel page URL follows this structure: https://www.i-escape.com/hotelname We'd like to change this to include some searchable words in the URL dependent on the type of hotel. For example: https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-hotels/hotelname or https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-apartments/hotelname If we do go ahead, we know we need to make sure all old style URLs canonically redirect to the new style. Is having the keyword in the URL important enough for us to change over 1500 URLs on the website? We have quite a high quality links pointing to these hotel pages URLs. Also, will this help us with navigation/user journeys/crawls as there will be a /boutique-hotels/hotelname rather than just /hotelname? Thanks so much all! Clair
Technical SEO | | iescape0 -
Is this type of navigation SEO friendly?
Hi mozzers, I wanted to know if this type of navigation SEO friendly. Is it better than the regular drop down menu navigation? Thanks! Ug4MhZw.png
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Author & Video Markup on the Same Page
I just have a quick question about using schema.org markup. Is there any situation where you'd want to include both author & video markup on the same page?
Technical SEO | | justinnerd0 -
Redirecting Domain will cause SEO?
I am redirecting my domain, based on Geo Location. For example : if someone browse from india www.example.com they will redirect to www.example.in Does redirecting domain on Geo based will cause SEO or Any kind of duplicate content issue, as i am using same content on both TLDs.
Technical SEO | | anishtapan0 -
Geotargeting by IP and SEO
Hi, Part of our site displays localized results based on the user's IP (we get the zipcode based on IP). For example a user in NY would get a list of NY based stores, while a user in CA would get a list of CA based stores. So if CA Googlebot comes to our site, it will get results based on Mountain View CA. Given the pages are generated based on your zip, I'm not sure how we'd indicate to Google that we have results for lots of locations and not just the Googlebot IP locations. (users can change their zipcode, but by default we use geolocation). Our landing pages contain localized content and unique urls with the zipcode etc, but it isn't clear how Google will find results for KY etc.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Subdomains
Hi, I have recently started working in-house for a company and one site development was started and completed just as I joined. A new area of the site has been developed, but the developers have developed this new section in php, which cannot be hosted on the windows server the site is running on (they tell me, is this correct?) They want to add the new section as a subdomain - http://newarea.example.co.uk/ whereas I would have preferred the section added as a new subfolder. I plan to ensure that future developments to not have this problem, but is the best solution to work with the subdomain (in this instance it may not be too bad as it is a niche area of the site), or can I redirect the pages hosted on the sub-domain to a subfolder, and is this recommended? Thanks for your time.
Technical SEO | | LSLPS0 -
What are the SEO related negative aspects of having a blog on a subdomain?
Just double checking this one. Is it less than ideal to have a blog on a subdomain rather than as a sub folder on a domain?
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0