Basic Multi-Site Question
-
Newb question. We run a site in multiple cities under the same domain. Often times one city will provide content that is "syndicated" to other cites.
For example, here is the master post:
The content will also show up in the following domains:
- http://atlanta.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/
- http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/
Should I be marketing the posts in Atlanta and Birmingham as "no index, no follow" for SEO purposes?
Thanks in advance, Jay
-
What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do.
In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" />
Hope this helps
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
-
Site hacked in Jan. Redeveloped new site. Still not ranking. Should we change domain?
Our top ranking site in the UK was hacked at the end of 2014. http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/ The site was the subject of a manual spam action from Google. After several unsuccessful attempts to clean it up, using Securi.net and reinstating old versions of the site, changing passwords etc. we took the decision to redevelop the site. We also changed hosting provider as we had received absolutely no support from them whatsoever in resolving the issue. So far we have: Removed the old website files off the server Developed a new website having implemented 301's for all the old URL's (except the spam ones) Submitted a reconsideration request for the manual spam action, which was accepted. Disavowed all the spammy inbound links through Webmaster Tools Implemented custom URL parameters through Google to not index the SPAM URLs ( which were using parameters) Our organic traffic is down by 63% compared to last year, and we are not ranking for most of our target keywords any longer. Is there anything that I am missing in the actions I have taken so far? We were advised that at this stage changing domain and starting again might be the way to go. However the current domain has been used by us since 2007, so it would be a big call. Any advice is appreciated, thanks. Sue - http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | galwaygirl0 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
HTML Site for Speed
I have a few small sites and landing pages on Wordpress that I want to load a lot quicker than they do. It occurred to me that if there is not a lot of content management necessary, I should simply make the static web pages straight html instead of trying all the modifications necessary to get some Wordpress sites and themes to load quicker. I have noticed the html sites I have load lighting fast on slow hosting service. Is this a good idea, can anyone think of drawbacks to it? Security? Responsiveness? SEO? And what about taking some company's sites with blog straight html so the home page loads quick, and then using Wordpress for the blog?
Technical SEO | | phogan0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
Redirecting the .com of our site
Hey guys, A company I consult for has a different site for its users depending on the geography. Example: When a visitor goes to www.company.com if the user is from the EU, it gets redirected to http://eu.company.com If the user is from the US, it goes to http://us.company.com And so on. I have two questions: Does having a redirect on the .com will influence rankings on each specific sub-site? I suspect it will affect the .com since it will simply not get indexed but not sure if affects the sub domains. The content on this sub-sites are not different (I´m still trying to figure out why they are using the sub-domains). Will they get penalized for duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | FDSConsulting0 -
Robots.txt Question
In the past, I had blocked a section of my site (i.e. domain.com/store/) by placing the following in my robots.txt file: "Disallow: /store/" Now, I would like the store to be indexed and included in the search results. I have removed the "Disallow: /store/" from the robots.txt file, but approximately one week later a Google search for the URL produces the following meta description in the search results: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more" Is there anything else I need to do to speed up the process of getting this section of the site indexed?
Technical SEO | | davidangotti0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1