Is it possible to redirect the main www. domain - but keep a subdomain active?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer...
Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com.
Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com. I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc.
Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist.
If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority? On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active.
Make sense? Any answers?
Thanks everyone...
-
Hi - thank you for your responses and sorry for my very late reply.
Appreciate your input on this. Ruth, the reason for this being in a consideration was because the company wanted to re-brand their customer-facing site (changing to newwebsite.com) but keep oldwebsite.com as a corporate site.
The issue of course is that, unless we did a complete domain transfer, we would lose some of the fantastic rankings that have been built up over two years of hard work. This got me thinking about whether I could give them both, i.e. create subdomain.oldwebsite.com even though the main site has been redirected and transferred.
Having thought about that, I wanted to know if anyone had tested this as it seemed like a potential loop-hole, whereby you might be able to have subdomain.oldwebsite.com and newwebsite.com both piggy-backing off the same DA. But, as you mentioned that DA doesn't transfer that well to subdomains, I guess this may be one reason why.
Thankfully, this strange scenario was avoided, as I finally managed to convince them to start a new corporate site on a .net or .org. The corporate site doesn't need to rank particularly, so I got my #1 solution anyway. The subdomain idea I posted above was a potential backup plan at best, as the CEO didn't look like budging for a while!
Thanks again - much appreciated! Incidentally, I have another question posted here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-not-indexing-xml-sitemap-images. It's really killing me, so I hope somebody can offer some assistance!
Cheers,
Mark
-
DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.
It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.
You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.
-
I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.
An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.
I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.
Just my thoughts.
-
Thanks for your response, Allen - much appreciated.
I probably wasn't clear in my original message that I am specifically interested in what happens to Domain Authority in that scenario - and wondered if anyone had tested this. Hence felt a web dev / IT forum would be the wrong place.
So I thought it might be possible to do this technically, for the reasons you mentioned. But what happens to the DA?
Let's say you redirect www.example.com to www.newsite.com. www.newsite.com then takes over from www.example.com in the rankings (done this several times and it's been near seamless).
But, I then want to set up a subdomain on example.com AFTER I have redirected www.example.com. Surely, that subdomain would retain some of that DA and thus have an unfair advantage. All of a sudden, I could engineer it so that subdomain.example.com AND www.newsite.com rank alongside each other.
Not tried this before so fascinated to see if the subdomain would rank - or whether because it's on a redirected site, it would not.
Cheers!
-
Hey guys,
Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.
What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com
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
-
Anything wrong in linking to homepage from all sub domain pages?
Hi, We have 6 sub domains which are forums, guides, etc. They have their own visitors for the related queries. We are planning to divert some of them to the website to promote our product with latest content. We are planning to add a link from every page of sub domain to our website homepage. This makes additional thousands of internal links flowing to website homepage. Will this kind of internal linking structure hurts? Any risks involved? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Is it possible to move a couple of posts and comments from one WP domain to another
Hi, We want to move a couple of dozen articles from one of our self-hosted wordpress website to another self-hosted Wordpress website. Is there a way to this such that the following content is also included in the migration:
Web Design | | seocuppa
1. Post content (including images and meta if possible)
2. Comments Do note the older site from which we want to move out the content has more than 2000 posts and we just want to move 60-70 posts. Thanks.0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
Domain Consolidation & Proper Linking Strategy?
We have a client that operates 5 gyms in 5 different part of Miami, and each gym has its own website. All sites rank well and have a a good pagerank. For the purpose of their marketing and brand they would like 1 website developed which includes all of their gyms which we are launching later today. Each gym will have it's own landing page within the website Should we redirect the URL's of the different websites to the individual landing pages on the new site or how should that work to minimize any penalties on our SEO. For example (these are fake url's): www.gymA.com, www.gymB.com, www.gymC.com, www.gymD.com The new url: www.gym.com New landing pages:
Web Design | | POPCreative
www.gym.com/gymA, www.gym.com/gymB, www.gym.com/gymC, www.gym.com/gymD Should we do a redirect from: www.gymA.com to www.gym.com/gymA www.gymB.com to www.gym.com/gymB www.gymC.com to www.gym.com/gymC www.gymD.com to www.gym.com/gymD Thank you in advanced. If there is a better way to do this, or anything extra I need to know, that would be great. Thanks!0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
Domain Analysis
Hi all, Thanks for taking time to view my first question. I've noticed quite a change in our domain analysis figures in the last month (we have dropped two points whilst a competitor has jumped up 7 points for domain authority) and wondered if this was unusual or not as I've only been a member for a couple of months and it seems to quite a leap for them!? Cubicle Centre Ltd (washroomcubicles.co.uk) from 35 to 33 and Venesta (venesta.co.uk) from 27 to 34 The main changes I can see are that our number of links for External Followed (EFL) / Total External (TEL) and Total Links (TL) has dropped considerably whilst their's have remained fairly constant: EFL from 439 to 242 TEL from 466 to 263 TL from 3686 to 2980 We have managed to hold a top three spot in Google for the search term 'toilet cubicles' (UK!) for quite a number of years now and I am concerned these figures may be the start of a fall / reduction in our search engine performance. If anybody could give me some feedback or maybe even take a peep at our website (http://www.washroomcubicles.co.uk/) and see if there are any major SEO issues which I need to address to improve on the stats above, it would be very much appreciated. Remember this is my first question so please go easy on me! Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | cubicle_Craig0 -
Javascript Redirects
So I have a client who uses a program called test and target by Adobe to test different pages of content for the best layout, design, etc. They use javascript redirects and css hide and show to hide content with div tags. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with test and target or knows about how these hidden div tags and javascript redirects will affect my indexing and SEO. I'm hoping for some guidance fairly quickly as well 🙂
Web Design | | CoolSEOnStuff0