Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
-
Hello,
Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain.
Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows?
Has anyone dealt with something similar?
Thanks very much in advance,
-
Thanks everyone, really helpful!
-
If its essentially a duplicate, thin content Login Screen... NoIndex, No Follow the page.
-
I would say it is unnatural, and therefore any links you have should be no-followed.
-
No. Thin content carries algorithmic penalty as well. Careful. Might want to stick with option 2.
-
Hi everyone,
Thanks for your recommendations. In a way, every subdomain is custom since every client's name is different and it prompts the client to login back into cPanel to reactivate the hosting.
The subdomains are not in a way 'expired', they are expired from a customer's point of view, but they are active and there is no duplicate content, since it says 'You are trying to access x.y.com', so it is different for every subdomain.
But they are all very low quality one-page subdomains, is it useful to have them as links towards the main site?
-
- Custom 404 page?
-
Options:
1.) set rel="canonical" tags on all of them referencing the main page within the href portion of the tag
2.) no-crawl, no-index the pages
3.) all of the above
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
-
How Can A SubDomain Out Perform A Root Domain?
Hi guys! I have a rather strange SEO question. It may not be that strange at all actually. If a site has a subdomain or a shopping cart that is on a subdomain through a third-party shopping cart provider, can the third party shopping cart transfer value to the subdomain causing the subdomain to have greater domain authority than the main site or root domain? Another question, this subdomain, up until yesterday, blocked google from crawling it with robots txt, however it has a much higher domain authority than the root domain. The root domain has a really low domain authority, despite not blocking google from crawling it. How is this possible? I hope these questions make sense. I am a little stumped & trying to figure out why the subdomain is out-performing the main site despite being hidden from search, if that's even the case. Please let me know if I have it all wrong..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prae0 -
HTML5: Changing 'section' content to be 'main' for better SEO relevance?
We received an HTML5 recommendation that we should change onpage text copy contained in 'section" to be listed in 'main' instead, because this is supposedly better for SEO. We're questioning the need to ask developers spend time on this purely for a perceived SEO benefit. Sure, maybe content in 'footer' may be seen as less relevant, but calling out 'section' as having less relevance than 'main'? Yes, it's true that engines evaluate where onpage content is located, but this level of granular focus seems unnecessary. That being said, more than happy to be corrected if there is actually a benefit. On a side note, 'main' isn't supported by older versions of IE and could cause browser incompatibilities (http://caniuse.com/#feat=html5semantic). Would love to hear others' feedback about this - thanks! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
International Image SEO - one host vs multiple hosts
I've got 3 sites (same name) located in Australia, US and UK. Currently these sites are all pulling images (I own) from 1 location. I'd like to create image XML sitemaps for each of these sites. As I see it, my options are: 1. Keeping the images hosted in the 1 place and creating image XML sitemaps for each of the 3 sites (which seems to be technically ok because https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en&ref_topic=20986 states that if the image URL isn't on the same domain, both domains need to be verified in Webmaster Tools). However, is there a risk here that the sitemaps will conflict because they are pulling from images on the same host? 2. Hosting the images locally (ie. the same images will be hosted in 3 locations) and applying hreflang in the sitemap. Does anyone know which of these options are best (obviously #1 would be more convenient), or whether there are any other options for attacking this issue? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oline1230 -
What is best practice SEO approach to re structuring a website with multiple domains and associated search engine rankings for each domain?
Hello Mozzers, I'm trying to improve and establish rankings for my website which has never really been optimised. I've inherited what seems to be a mess and have a challenge for you! The website currently has 3 different www domains all pointing to the one website, two are .com domains and one is a .com.au - the business is located in Australia and the website is primarily targeting Australian traffic. In addition to this there are a number of other non www domains for the same addresses pointing to the website in the CMS which is Adobe Business Catalyst. When I check Google each of the www domains for the website has the following number of pages indexed: www.Domain1,com 5,190 pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimmyFlorida
www.Domain2.com 1,520 pages
www,Domain3.com.au 149 pages What is best practice approach from an SEO perspective to re organising this current domain structure? 1. Do I need to use the .com.au as the primary domain given that we are in this market and targeting traffic here? Thats what I have been advised and it seems to be backed up by what I have read here. 2. Do we re direct all domains to the primary .com.au domain? This is easily done in the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS however is this the same as a 301 redirect which is the best approach from an SEO perspective? 3. How do we consolidate all of the current separate domain rankings for the 3 different domains into the one domain rankings within Google to ensure improved rankings and a best practice approach? The website is currently receiving very little organic search traffic so if its simpler and faster to start again fresh rather than go through a complicated migration or re structure and you have a suggestion here please feel free to let me know your ideas! Thank you!0 -
Sitemaps and subdomains
At the beginning of our life-cycle, we were just a wordpress blog. However, we just launched a product created in Ruby. Because we did not have time to put together an open source Ruby CMS platform, we left the blog in wordpress and app in rails. Thus our web app is at http://www.thesquarefoot.com and our blog is at http://blog.thesquarefoot.com. We did re-directs such that if the URL does not exist at www.thesquarefoot.com it automatically forwards to blog.thesquarefoot.com. What is the best way to handle sitemaps? Create one for blog.thesquarefoot.com and for http://www.thesquarefoot.com and submit them separately? We had landing pages like http://www.thesquarefoot.com/houston in wordpress, which ranked well for Find Houston commercial real estate, which have been replaced with a landing page in Ruby, so that URL works well. The url that was ranking well for this word is now at blog.thesquarefoot.com/houston/? Should i delete this page? I am worried if i do, we will lose ranking, since that was the actual page ranking, not the new one. Until we are able to create an open source Ruby CMS and move everything over to a sub-directory and have everything live in one place, I would love any advice on how to mitigate damage and not confuse Google. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry) Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example) Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword. These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc) Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure 🙂 So - to questions/thoughts. 1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally. 2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them) 3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant? 4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that? I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Capote0 -
Evaluate the value of domain
We have a chance to purchase a domain with our main KW dot net. We are already a competitor for this KW in its other variations. This domain is currently being used as a re-direct to another site. What are the risks associated with changing domain names and how to best evaluate if this domain will even help us win that KW in Google results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devonkrusich0 -
Duplicate content on sub-domains?
I have 2 subdamains intented for 2 different countries (Colombia and Venezuela) ve.domain.com and co.domain.com. The site it's an e-commerce with over a million products available so they have the same page with the same content on both sub-domains....the only differences are the prices a payment options. Does google take that as duplicate content? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0