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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 -
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
hmmm...
do they point to the same IP address?
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
-
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
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-films0 -
Are .clinic domains effective?
We acquired a .clinic domain for a client, they are right now running under a .ca and I was just wondering if there were any cons to making the switch. On the flip side are there any pros? I've tried to search for the answer but couldn't seem to come across anything, thank you if you have any knowledge or could point me to a resource.
Technical SEO | | webignite0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0 -
Best geotargeting strategy: Subdomains or subfolders or country specific domain
How have the relatively recent changes in how G perceives subdomains changed the best route to onsite geotargeting i.e. not building out new country specific sites on country specific and hosted domains and instead developing sub-domains or sub-folders and geo-targeting those via webmaster tools ? In other words, given the recent change in G perception, are sub-domains now a better option than a sub-folder or is there not much in it ? Also if client has a .co.uk and they want to geo-target say France, is the sub-domain/sub-folder route still an option or is the .co.uk still too UK specific, and these options would only work using a .com ? In other words can sites on country specific domains (.co.uk , .fr, .de etc etc) use sub-folders or domains to geo-target other countries or do they have no option other than to develop new country specific (domains/hosting/language) websites ? Any thoughts regarding current best practice in this regard much appreciated. I have seen last Febs WBF which covers geotargeting in depth but the way google perceives subdomains has changed since then Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Mobile Domain Setup
Hi, If I want to serve a subset of pages on my mobile set from my desktop site or the content is significantly different, i.e. it is not one to one or pages are a summarised version of the desktop, should I use m.site.com or is it still better to use site.com? Many thanks any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0