Are multiple domains for my website hurting my Google ranking?
-
Hello,
I currently have two domains showing up in google search:
These domains are currently ranked in the #2 and #3 spot, however my page is much more trafficked than the current #1 ranking. I am wondering if the fact that I have two domains competing for the #1 spot is hurting my search ranking. If so, what is the best way to remedy this issue and get back my #1 spot?
I'm rather new to SEO and teaching myself as I go, so I appreciate the feedback!
-
Here's the post on Search Engine Roundtable that discusses Google's comments about this not being a ranking change.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-subdomains-webmaster-tools-13968.html
-
FYI, it looks like you're 302-redirecting the "shop." sub-domain to a deeper page on the root domain. This can be the worst of both worlds, in some cases. I'm not clear on the reasoning, but if "shop." is the e-commerce/store sub-domain, I'd rather see you 301-redirect it to "/shop" or something like that.
I realize you may have technical constraints that require the e-commerce site to be on a subdomain. There are ways around that, like a reverse proxy.
From a purely SEO standpoint, you can potentially rank 2 sub-domains (Google keeps changing their mind on that, it seems), but you're also potentially splitting the link-juice between those sub-domains. In most cases, I don't find the sub-domain approach to be a good long-term strategy. On the other hand, if you're ranking #2 and #3 and aren't seeing a downside, you've got to consider that data.
-
Google hasn't been clear on this - they stated later (I can't recall where, unfortunately) that this change was only an accounting change in Google Webmaster Tools. It didn't change how they actually pass link-juice across subdomains. I've found it can go both ways. Some subdomains fragment and get treated as separate domains, and others seem to get more tightly integrated. It depends a lot on the site, structure, duplication, etc.
-
Glad to see you also sorted out the non-www to www permanent redirect on shwoodshop.com. I would say that this is the quickest way to get site wide content duplication.
Now that you have these redirects put in place your site will be ok. Just make sure you don't delete the redirects!
-
Perfect! Thanks again for your input. I really appreciate your help!
-
These are 2 completely different pages so you should be fine now. As for the question "will it hurt if Google indexes both?", not at all. Actually it's every SEOs dream to get 2 pages from one site indexed on 1st page. Although, it's best practice to make sure that each page's content and meta tags are unique to each other. The reason is that sometimes these can also battle for serp position if they are closely alike in terms of content and meta tags. Just make sure there unique and focused on what that specific page has to offer. But then once again if your already have a keyword ranking on 1st page for both urls then its probably best to leave them as is and see what the result 301 redirect will accomplish for you. Allow for it to be re-indexed by Google again.
-
Thanks so much for your response! I went ahead and used the 301 redirects to direct everything to www.shwoodshop.com.
Now that everything is pointing to the same place, is there any harm in having both www.shwoodshop.com and www.shwoodshop.com/collections/all show up in a google search? These pages aren't competing now, correct?
According to the SEOmoz data, my page www.shwoodshop.com is much stronger than my competitors' when googling "wood sunglasses" so I just want to see if there are any obvious factors limiting my search strength.
Thanks again everyone!
-
Hi Taylor, As I had done some of the analysis for your both domains. If you use both domain then it will hurt your ranking according to google.
The analysis that I had done as below:
This is website that have Page rank =5
Google Indexing Backlinks=274
Secondly your shop.shwoodshop.com is redirect to http://shwoodshop.com/collections/all these page which have following factors:
This is website that have Page rank =4
Google Indexing Backlinks=274
One of the most important issue that I found that your website does not have 301 redirect error set up.
This would results that there are two separate domains i. e http://www.shwoodshop.com/ & http://shwoodshop.com/, so it is better to redirect it to the one & only single page according to their preferred domain.
Below there is a link which tells you that multiple domain are bad for SEOm& website too:
http://www.seo.com/blog/multiple-domains-seo/
&
http://blog.ineedhits.com/tips-advice/why-owning-multiple-domain-names-is-bad-for-seo-02539442.html
I hope that your query had been solved.
-
This use to be the case but recently Google now treats the sub domain as internal links see the changes here: http://searchengineland.com/new-google-classifies-subdomains-as-internal-links-within-webmaster-tools-91401
Overall I do not think this will be a problem having your sub domain and your main url rank for a term, that been said if both the sub domain and main website have unique content and are well linked it can be a good strategy.
I remember one website in a local insurance niche doing this well for a long time
-
Hello Taylor,
Is this a trick question? The reason I ask is because the shop.shwoodshop.com you are talking about already redirects to http://shwoodshop.com/collections/all. Also I notice an important factor that might help your site rank better. I recently suggested this to a client and within a few days his site moved to 1spot from 4th position. I am not guaranteeing it will work but its actually an issue that needs to be resolved anyhow. If your utilizing the SEOMOZ software then the first thing you will notice if running a campaign is a notification from the software stating the following:
We have detected that the domain www.shwoodshop.com and the domain shwoodshop.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective.
I suggest that you fix this by either 301 redirecting the non www to www or vice versa. It all depends for which version you already have keywords ranking on. In other words if your already ranking for keywords on the www version then you will want to redirect the non www to it. If it's the non www that you are already ranking for then you will benefit from directing the www to the non www.
I hope that helps
-
As far as I know Google will treat content on a subdomain as a separate website, so chances are you're splitting the domain authority over the two websites.
As far as PageRank is concerned this is on a **per page basis (n**ot per site). Every page is ranked on its own individual merits.
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
-
Huge difference between GSC ranking and browser ranking for certain keywords: How to proceed?
Hi, There is a huge ranking difference between the GSC and browser for our primary keyword. As per GSC, our ranking is around 15 and when checking on the multiple different incognito browsers it's around 50. How to handle this? Which is the accurate one? Product expert from Google forums claim that what I see on browsers are the personalized results; but I tried on different browsers with different connections. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Reviews - Google & Third Party
Hi We have reviews on our product pages & service reviews on Feefo, but how important is it to also drive customers to review your company on Google? I'm guessing we should be doing both, but it proves difficult when you already ask them to review your company through a third party? Any tips moz?
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Algo Update
Hi I'm trying to look into how the update in Oct - Nov affected our site. It's positive with us ranking for more keywords, but I wondered if anyone knew what had changed. For example, one of our pages ranked for 291 keywords in October, now it ranks for 406 keywords. We've done nothing to this page in that time. I just want to try and understand what's happening with the algorithm a little more (although I'm sure everyone does :). Does anyone have any insights? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Mobile Algorithm update
Hi there, On April the 21st Google seems to going to update their Mobile algorithm. I have a few questions about this one. Our current mobile website is very mobile friendly. We block all mobile pages with a noindex, so the desktop pages have been indexed on mobile devices. We use a redirect from desktop page to mobile page when someone hits a result on a mobile device. My gut tells me this is not April 21st-proof so I'm thinking about an update to make this whole thing adaptive. By making the thing adaptive, our mobile pages will be indexed instead of the desktop pages. Two questions: Will Google treat the mobile page as a 100% different page than the desktop page? Or will it match those two because everything will tell Google those belong together. In other words: will the mobile page start with a zero authority and will pages lose good organic positions because of authority or not? Which ranking factor will be stronger after April 21st for mobile pages: page authority or mobile friendliness? In other words: is it worth ignoring the 21 April update because the authority of the desktop pages is more important than making every page super mobile friendly? Hope to get some good advice! Marcel
Algorithm Updates | | MarcelMoz0 -
Google Rankings Dropped in Past Few Weeks
Hi All, I work for an online appliance retailer and over the past weeks, we've seen a drop in our google SERPs. This time last year we were ranking in the top 3 for our top converting key terms, but now we are ranking towards the bottom of the first page or even on the top of the second page with the big box stores now dominating for our key terms. Needless to say traffic for these pages has dropped off considerably. We still have quite a bit of traffic coming in for other key terms, but they don't convert as well. Is anyone else seeing the same thing? If so what are you doing to combat this? Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
Why do I have 7 URLs from the same domain ranking on the 1st page?
I have a client that has individual pages for authorized dealers of their product (say "Car Dealers"). When you search for "brand name + location", Google returns 7 "dealership" pages from the parent company's domain as the first 7 results, but there is one that gets pushed off to the 5th page of the SERPs. The formatting of content, geo-targeting, and meta data on the page is identical on every single one. None of them have external links and there is not one extremely distinguishable thing to assess why the one page doesn't get placed on that first SERP. Why is the one getting pushed so far down? I know this may be a bit confusing, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Measuring Author Rank
It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO. Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric. Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined? Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look? This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. Best, Matt.
Algorithm Updates | | MattBarker3 -
Rankings in Bing/Yahoo lower than in Google
Other than a few keywords, my rankings are consistently lower in MSN/Bing/Yahoo than in Google. Any ideas or suggestions as to why?
Algorithm Updates | | NueMD0