Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
-
Hi,
I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) .
Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain.
Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation?
any help is appreciated!
-
Thanks for the advise Carson!
-
Firstly, I wouldn't worry about your customers creating "low-quality links" unless your customers are exclusively spammers. Low authority links and spam links are two very different things in Google's eyes.
If the links point to pages that a user could not see without logging in, simply use a meta robots noindex to ensure the pages won't appear in search results. This isn't especially critical, since the page would be unlikely to appear in results anyway, but you can follow the best practice of blocking content behind a wall if you're worried about it.
If you do have a lot of customers running sites Google might consider spammy, let me know and we'll talk about it from there. Otherwise you don't need to worry.
-
Hi Nakul,
Thanks for the reply.
Sorry I wasn't a little more specific in my initial question. Anyhow our secure site is not at all the same as our public site. The secure site is used by our customers to access their accounts and use our applications. An example would be a click-to-call. If one of our customers uses our click to call service on every page of their website, then we will have several links from that customer's site back to our secure site. My concern is that this could be negatively impacting our public site since both use the same root domain.
Any thoughts on whether or not this could be a problem?
Thanks again for your help!
-
Are the URLs, pages/filenames 100% in sync between the secure subdomain and the main/public site ? If that's the case (and if it makes sense, you add a canonical on your secure.subdomain.com to public.subdomain.com pages). This way your secure.subdomain.com will not get indexed in the SERPS and will act as a 301 redirect.
P.S. Only do this if the pages are 100% in SYNC and the only difference is price etc. This way only 1 version of the pages get indexed. Users linking to your secure site will NOT get redirected, they will still see the secure site. But when the bots follow the link, they will see the canonical link as a strong directive not to index this page but your public equivalent of the same page.
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
-
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
I've consolidated other domains to a single one with 301 redirects, yet the new domain authority in MOZ is much less that the redirected ones. Is that right?
I'm trying to increase the domain authority of my main site, so decided to consolidate other sites. One of the other sites has a much higher domain authority, but I don't know why after a 301 redirect, the new site's domain authority hasn't changed on over a month. Does MOZ take account of thes types of things?
Technical SEO | | bytecgroup2 -
Multiple Domains pointing to one IP
Hi we have some issues with Multiple domains pointing to one IP. is this considered duplicate content by Google? If so, what is the best thing can we do to avoid this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Questions about root domain setup
Hi There, I'm a recent addition to SEOmoz and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure things out. This whole SEO process has been a bit of a brain burner but its slowly becoming a little more clearer. For awhile I noticed that I was unable to get Open Site Explorer to display information about my site. It mentioned that that there was not enough data for the URL. Too recent of a site, no links, etc. Eventually I changed the the URL to include "www." and it pulled up results. I also noticed that a few of my page warnings are because of duplicate page content. One page will be listed as http://enbphotos.com. The other will be listed as http://www.enbphotos.com. I guess I'm not sure what this all means and how to change it. I'm also not really sure what the terminology even is and something regarding root domain seemed appropriate but I'm not sure if it is accurate. Any help/suggestions/links would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | enbphotos0 -
Conserving Link Equity When Purchasing a Domain
Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain? (Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Root domain not resolving to www. Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm working with a domain that stays on the root domain if the www is not included. But if the www is included, it stays with the www. LIke this: example.com
Technical SEO | | HardyIntl
or
www.example.com Of course, they are identical and both go to the same IP. Do search engines consider that to be duplicate content? thanks,
michael0 -
Two domains One hosting account
I have two separate domains set up on one hosting account through godaddy. Will this affect the SEO negatively? They are completely different sites with their own unique domains but on my local files the second domain is set up as a subfolder for the original hosted domain. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | DavetheExterminator0 -
301 redirect on the root of the site
Due to some historic difficulties with our URL Rewriter, we are in the position of having the root of our site 301 redirected to another page. So the root of our site: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/ has a 301 redirect to: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/home.aspx We're aware that this isn't great and we're working to fix this completely, but what impact will this have on our SEO?
Technical SEO | | LianWard860