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.
Will errors on a subdomain effect the overall health of the root domain?
-
As stated in the question, we have 2 sub domains that contain over 2000 reported errors from SEOMOZ.
The root domain has a clean bill of health, and i was just wondering if these errors on the sub-domains could have a negative effect on the root domain in the eyes of Google.
Your comments will be appreciated.
Regards
Greg
-
Hi Greg - short answer is, it depends... Which means, of course, there's a long answer
In Google's eyes, subdomains are often, though not always, treated as separate entities from the main domain, meaning if content or issues on them is giving Google trouble, that won't necessarily extend to the other parts of the domain. However, this isn't always the case. We've certainly seen times when having spam or manipulative behavior on a subdomain meant the root domain and content on it suffered as well.
In the case you're describing, if the crawl issues are things like missing meta descriptions or long titles or other less-than-critical errors, I wouldn't be too worried. But if it's lots of 404s or duplicate content or infinite redirect loops, those could cause issues.
If you're really not worried at all about what Google thinks of the subdomains or the content on them, you could always use robots.txt to block them from accessing it, which should cause Google to not weight that content when judging the site as a whole.
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
-
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Technical SEO | | usDragons0 -
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Effective use of hReview
Hi fellow Mozzers! I am just in the process of adding various reviews to our site (a design agency), but I wanted to use the ratings in different ways depending on the page. So for the home page and the services (branding, POS, direct mail etc) I wanted to aggregate relevant reviews (giving us an average of all reviews for the home page, an average of ratings from all brand projects and so on). Then, I wanted to put specific reviews on our portfolio pages, so the review relates specifically to that project. This is the easiest to do as the hReview generator is geared up for reviews that come from one source, but I can't find a way of aggregating the star ratings to make an average rating rich snippet. Anyone know where I can get the coding for this? Thanks in advance! Nick.
Technical SEO | | themegroup0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
Howdy. I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway! Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched. We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately. Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SamTurri0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0