Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Subdomain vs Main Domain Penalties

    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.

    Subdomain vs Main Domain Penalties

    Technical SEO
    6
    10
    6546
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Prospector-Plastics
      Prospector-Plastics last edited by

      We have a client who's main root.com domain is currently penalized by Google, but the subdomain.root.com is appearing very well. We're stumped - any ideas why?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Prospector-Plastics
        Prospector-Plastics @MarieHaynes last edited by

        Extremely helpful insight Marie - I will be contacting you directly soon.

        It appears that the duplicate content you've found (and other dupe content we've found) is actually our content that other sites have repurposed. Seems like Google has determined our site as the culprit, so this would be an issue we need to address - the only thought that comes to mind right away is adding an 'Author' tag, then start working on what appears to be a hefty cleanup project, something that looks like you are an expert on and will most likely be working directly with you in the near future! 🙂

        The 2nd level pages that have little content and lots of links are 'noindex,follow' but I'm nervous about the number of these tags throughout our site which could be seen as spammy to a search engine. Of note, the 2nd level page section you have found ranks quite well since it is a subdomain which is interesting. Our suspicion is that since we made the 404 (200 success) error that Google detected on Dec. 9, 2011, we have been on some sort of Google 'watch-list' and any little thing we do incorrectly that they find, we immediately are penalized.

        The homepage description of our company is reused on industry directories that we are listed on, so perhaps we must consider re-writing our description to be unique, and adding more content to the homepage would be a good thing and is certainly easily doable.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • MarieHaynes
          MarieHaynes @Prospector-Plastics last edited by

          You have some significant duplicate content issues with www.ides.com.  There is not a lot of text on your home page and what is there is duplicated in many places across the web.

          Your second level pages are all just links.  I would noindex, follow these.

          I looked at two inner pages:

          http://plastics.ides.com/generics/6/alphamethylstyrene-ams - extremely thin content

          Here is a Google search for text I copied from the styrene-acrylonitrile page.  There are 247 pages that use this opening sentence.

          My guess is that this is indeed a Panda issue.  But please know that I've only just taken a quick look so I can't say for sure.  What doesn't make sense is that your traffic drops don't happen on Panda dates which really should be the case if it was Panda.

          Panda definitely can affect just one part of a site (such as a root and not a subdomain).  I would work on making these pages completely unique and also noindexing the thin pages.

          Prospector-Plastics 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Prospector-Plastics
            Prospector-Plastics @MarieHaynes last edited by

            Thank you Marie,

            We 301 redirect any traffic going to root.com to www.root.com, and any content that we moved from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com has been completely removed from www.root.com. There doesn't appear to be any duplicate content between the two. There is some duplicate content that we treat with canonicals on subdomain.root.com - very small portion of total pages (less than 1%).

            As for your other questions, no warnings in WMT. Robots txt file looks clean, canonicals are in place correctly, and no accidental non-indexing that we know of.

            Here is the actual site that might help to look at:

            http://www.ides.com
            http://plastics.ides.com/materials
            http://www.ides.com/robots.txt

            MarieHaynes 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • MarieHaynes
              MarieHaynes last edited by

              I think the answer here depends on whether or not you have actually been penalized and why the site is dropping out of the SERPS.  Do you have a warning in WMT?  If not, then you're probably not penalized.

              It's unlikely to be Penguin because Penguin did not refresh lately.  Similarly, Panda did not refresh on the days you mentioned.  So, it's not likely a penalty but rather some type of site structure issue.

              Is there duplicate content between the subdomain and the root?  If so, then Google will choose one as the owner and not show the other prominently.  Any issues with robots.txt?  Are the canonicals set correctly?  Any chance of accidental noindexing?

              Prospector-Plastics 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Maximise
                Maximise last edited by

                Subdomains and root domains are not necessarily always owned by the same person and therefore will not always be given the same penalties. As Scott mentioned, they are seen as different sites.

                e.g. If I create a new WordPress account and create me.wordpress.com and then build a black hat site which gets penalized, this is not going to affect you.wordpress.com or  www.wordpress.com.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Prospector-Plastics
                  Prospector-Plastics last edited by

                  Thank you all for your insight - good stuff, but still stumped.

                  Here's everything we know that might help point out why the main domain (ie www.root.com) was penalized by Google. We redirect root.com to www.root.com with a 301 redirect, and it is setup this way in Google Webmaster Tools too.

                  December 9, 2011 - the site's 404 error page was incorrectly setup as a 200, resulting in a quick bloat of 1 million plus pages. The website dropped from Google immediately. The error page was correctly setup 2 days later. The site still appeared in Google's index via site: query. However the site didn't reappear in Google's SERPs until May 2, 2012.

                  October 25, 2012 - the website again drops from Google for an unknown reason. We then moved a significant portion of content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com. Pages from subdomain.root.com began appearing within 3 days as high they appeared previously on Google. From December 9, 2011 throughout this entire time we were correcting any errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools on a daily basis.

                  February 26, 2013 - The website yet again is dropped from Google, the subdomain.root.com continues to appear and rank well.

                  Due to moving most of the content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com, the index for www.root.com from October 2012 dropped from 142,000 slowly to an average of 21,400 ending at today's 4,230. However this index count fluctuates greatly every few days (probably due to moving content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com).

                  Of note, the site is NOT a content farm, but legitimate unique technical content that is hosted for hundreds of clients.

                  Again any ideas are most welcome!

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • ScottJames13
                    ScottJames13 last edited by

                    From my understanding subdomains are considered completely separate from root domains unless you have a 301 redirect or conical that tells search engines you want them to consider the root or the subdomain to be the same; for example, http://www.yourdomain.com (subdomain) points to http://yourdomain.com

                    Therefore, you could have a subdomain out rank a root domain, or in your case a root domain penalized and the subdomain continue to rank well. The fact that they share an IP address shouldn't affect all the domains under that IP as many websites are on shared hosting which use the same IP address.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • AdamThompson
                      AdamThompson last edited by

                      This isn't necessarily surprising. Penalties and negative ranking algorithms can be applied at a page level, a subdomain level, a root domain level, etc.

                      For example, HubPages used subdomains to help escape from a Panda slap.

                      Another example: Google placed a manual penalty on a single page of BBC's website.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • jesse-landry
                        jesse-landry last edited by

                        hmmm...

                        do they point to the same IP address?

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        Got a burning SEO question?

                        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                        Start my free trial


                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • usDragons

                          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 | | usDragons
                          0
                        • the-gate-films

                          URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?

                          I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.

                          Technical SEO | | the-gate-films
                          0
                        • kuchenchef

                          Redirect typo domains

                          Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?

                          Technical SEO | | kuchenchef
                          0
                        • AL123al

                          Umbrella company and multiple domains

                          I'm really sorry for asking this question yet again. I have searched through previous answers but couldn't see something exactly like this I think. There is a website called example .com. It is a sort of umbrella company for 4 other separate domains within it - 4 separate companies. The Home page of the "umbrella" company website is example.com. It is just an image with no content except navigation on it to direct to the 4 company websites. The other pages of website example.com are the 4 separate companies domains. So on the navigation bar there is : Home page = example.com company1page = company1domain.com company2page= company2domain.com etc. etc. Clicking "home" will take you back to example.com (which is just an image). How bad or good is this structure for SEO? Would you recommend any changes to help them rank better? The "home" page has no authority or links, and neither do 3 out of the 4 other domains. The 4 companies websites are independent in content (although theme is the same). What's bringing them altogether is under this umbrella website -  example.com. Thank you

                          Technical SEO | | AL123al
                          0
                        • Houdoe

                          CNAME vs 301 redirect

                          Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
                          www.maindomain.eu
                          www.maindomain.com
                          www.otherdomain.nl
                          www.otherdomain.com
                          ... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
                          Hans

                          Technical SEO | | Houdoe
                          0
                        • AscendLearning

                          Transfer a Main Domain to a Sub-Domain

                          My IT department tells me they want to transfer my main site domain, which has been in existence since 1999 as an e-commerce site (maindomain.com) to a sub-domain (www2.maindomain.com) or a completely new domain (newdomain.net). This is because we are launching a new website and B2C e-commerce engine, but we still have to maintain the legacy B2B e-commerce engine which contains hard-coded URLs, and both systems can't use the same domain. I've been researching the issue across SEOmoz, but I haven't come across this exact type of scenario (mostly I've seen a sub-domain to new domain). I see major problems with their proposal, including negative SEO impact, loss of domain authority/ranking and issues with branding. Does anyone know the exact type of impact I can expect to see in this scenario and specific steps I should go about to minimize the impact? Btw, I will be using Danny Dover's guide on properly moving domains where appropriate. Thanks!

                          Technical SEO | | AscendLearning
                          0
                        • vernonmack

                          Blogs are best when hosted on domain, subdomain, or...?

                          I’ve heard the it is a best practice to host your blog within your site. I’ve also heard it’s best to put it on a subdomain.  What do you believe is the best home for your blog and why?

                          Technical SEO | | vernonmack
                          0
                        • PrintingForLess.com

                          Checkout on different domain

                          Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate.  Thanks!

                          Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        • Digital Marketers
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.