Fourth and Third Level Subdomain Interlinking
-
Hi everyone. I have a hopefully interesting client question I wanted to pose. I do work for a company with three distinct locations that have unique offerings, service areas, etc.
I wouldn't want to see the three locations as subfolders (example company.com/locationone/, company.com/locationtwo/) of one site. They are large and unique presences. Fortunately, they did not organize their locations in such a way, and currently have their locations organized as subdomains, as in locationone.company.com, locationtwo.company.com. I might have preferred locationone.com, locationtwo.com, etc., but that is what I am working with.
Their developer has been building new content on fourth level domains, as in newcontent.locationone.company.com and newcontent2.locationone.company.com. In one case one of these fourth level domains also contains a different but parallel checkout process to the one already present on third level domain locationone.company.com.
I am looking for advice on how to interlink these sites, and whether to discourage them from building out new fourth level domains (newcontent3.locationone.company.com, etc.) or even to get rid of the current fourth level domains altogether. I'm not sure if the fact that they're subdomains and not subfolders matters as much as it used to.
Is this a case of subdomain phobia, or are my concerns justified? Any special advice on dealing with interlinking across fourth, third, and second level domains?
Thanks!
-
Hi Robyn,
Tom Schmitz has written awesome post on inter linking and website structure. Here is the link:
Hope this will help you out....
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
-
Process to move blog from subdomain on Wordpress, to subfolder on BigCommerce store
Hi Having weighed up all the angles, it's time to bite the bullet and move our blog from a subdomain to a subfolder on our ecommerce store. But as someone new to SEO I am struggling to find the correct process for doing this properly for our situation. Can anyone help? I have outlined what I have learned so far in 10 steps below to hopefully help you understand my situation, where I am at and what I am struggling with. Advice, tips and suggested further reading on all/any of the 10 points would be great. Some quick background The blog is on Wordpress, and on a subdomain of our store (blog.store.com). It is four years old, with 80 original posts we want to move to a subfolder of the store (store.com/blog). The store has been built using BigCommerce, and has also been active for four years. Both the blog and the store exist as properties within our Google Search Console. The 10 steps required for the move, based on research so far, and the associated questions 1 Prepare new site: which I am guessing means reproducing all of the content over at the new subfolder location (store.com/blog)? 2 Setup errors for any pages not being transferred: I have no idea how to do this! 3 Make sure analytics is working for the new pages: it should be as the both the site the pages are moving to a subfolder of is already running with analytics and has been for years - is this a safe assumption? 4 Map all URLs being moved to their new counterparts: is this just record keeping? In a spreadsheet? Or is it a process I don't yet understand?? 5 Add rel='cannonical' tags: while I understand the concept of these, I have no idea how to implement them properly here! 6 Create and save new sitemaps: as both the blog.store.com and store.com exist in Google Search Console already, can I just refresh the sitemap for store.com/blog once the subfolder is created to achive this? 7 Setup and test 301 redirects: these can be created in BigCommerce for the new pages in the store.com/blog subfolder, and will refer back to the blog.store.com URLs the pages came from - is this the right way to do this? I am still learning here and know enough to know how much this can matter, but not enough to fully grasp the intricacies of the process 8 Move URLs simultaneously: I have no idea what this means or how to achieve it! is this just for big site moves? Does it still apply to 80 blog posts shifting from a subdomain to a subfolder on the same root? If so, how? 9 Submit a change of address in Google Search Console: This looks simple enough although Google ominously warn: ‘Don't use this tool unless you are moving your primary website presence to a new address’ Which makes me wonder how simple it really is - my primary website in this case is the store, which is not moving. address But does 'primary' here simply mean the individual property with search console? I am going in circles on this one! 10 Configure the old blog on the subdomain to redirect people and engines to the new pages: I thought the 301 redirects and rel='cannonical' stuff did that already? What did I miss?? For anyone still here, thanks for making it this far and if you still have the energy left, any advice would be great! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Warren_331 -
Purchase second-level gTLDs?
So, I've been asked if it makes SEO sense for our company to grab a bunch of second-level gTLD (which we were earlier calling gTLD subdomains incorrectly) so that we can capitalize on redirecting them to our relevant pages that might not be ranking as well (if Google treats them like EMDs). For instance, buy something analogous to red.shoes, blue.shoes, purple.shoes and so on and then redirect them to our relevant pages for that product. Someone owns the .shoes domain but is happy to sell us second-level domains like red.shoes for $20-30. The question is, if we scoop up 100 or so of these relevant to our product, will it matter? I guess it depends on how Google is going to treat these. Anyone know?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Subdomain, subfolder or separate domains?
Hi Mozzers, We're in the process of re-developing and redesigning several of our websites, and moving them all onto the same content management system. At the moment, although the websites are all under the same brand and roughly the same designs, because of various reasons they all either live on a separate domain to the main website, or are on a subdomain. Here's a list of what we have (and what we're consolidating): Main site - http://www.frenchentree.com/ Property database - http://france-property.frenchentree.com/ (subdomain) Forum - http://www.france-forum-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) Classified ads - http://www.france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) My question to you lovely people is: should we take this opportunity through the redevelopment of the CMS to put everything into subfolders of the main domain? Keep things as they are? Put each section onto a subdomain? What's best from an SEO perspective? For information - the property database was put onto a subdomain as this is what we were advised to do by the developers of the system. We're starting to question this decision though, as we very rarely see subdomains appear in SERPs for any remotely competitive search terms. Our SEO for the property database is fairly non-existent, and only ever really appears in SERPs for brand related keywords. For further info - the forum and classifieds were under a separate brand name previously, so keeping them on separate domains felt correct at that time. However, with the redevelopment of our sites, it seems to make more sense to either put them on subdomains or subfolders of the main site. Our SEO for the forum is pretty strong, though has dwindled in the last year or so. Any help/advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Demote subdomain sitelink?
Google search is creating 4 sitelinks for a website. One of these is the blog (blog.website.com). Webmaster tools allows for site links to be demoted, but there is no way to demote the blog we which we don't want to show up since it is not a "/" extension. Is there a way to remove it as a site link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0 -
HubPages, Squidoo and subdomains
Just want to check my thinking on something. So, Google says subdomains stand on their own right? They don't get juice from the root domain. If this is true, the subdomains on a site like HubPages or WordPress.com are essentially a PR0 domain, right? Something like, mysub.hubpages.com. But if you posted an article on Squidoo, a site that doesn't use subdomains, you should get some juice from the root domain passed to your post, right? I usually go the guest blogging route, but I recently read a couple of posts on Web 2.0 link wheels swearing they are awesome, but most of the time the recommendation is to build it using what I perceive to be PR0 sites - Wordpress.com, Tumblr, HubPages subdomains. You would have to develop those sites so they have PR in order to pass juice. Am I off base here or does building a link wheel in this way seem like a waste of time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendlymachine0 -
The use of subdomains to improve SEO?
A clients website which provide a number of trade services which have a page for each service they provide for example: carpentry or electrician or plumbing etc. currently these pages are found at domain.co.uk/bathrooms/ bathrooms.html I am trying to optmise each page better as they are competing with other sites who for example sell bathrooms rather than bathroom installers or plumbers. As part of the on page optimisation I plan to change the page names and directory structure. I had an idea to split the website down into subdomains for various sections i.e for all their services Create a sub domain such as http://plumber.domain.co.uk 2.) upload the relevant content (in this example the plumbing page) to the sub domain location 3.) correct all the links to absolute URLs for each sub domain / Will this help target better use of keywords in the URL in terms of SEO efforts ? hope it makes sense thanks Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Should subdomains be avoided for brand new websites?
When creating a brand new website, will setting it up as a subdomain provide ranking benefits? I understand that if it's an existing domain, it's better to use a subfolder because a subdomain is treated as a different domain. But is there any reason not to start a website with the keyword in the subdomain? For example: keyword.domain.com The SERP's are dominated by websites which contain some variation of the head term, but the disadvantage of doing a similar this is your website looks very similar. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonDavies540 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0