Removing Sub Domain & Improving Page Performance
-
Hello Moz folks,
This question is about my main website: www.web3.ca
(run on joomla)I just noticed a very strange occurrence - when I add ANY subdomain to the home page, it still resolves to the home page. example:
Can this be bad for SEO, and is there a way to eliminate this?
Second Question: Do you think there are two many outgoing links on the home page of Web3? Could reducing the number of links improve the home page's performance & rank?
Thanks
Anton -
Hi Anton
I have seen this duplicate issue before and from my knowledge there are a lot of sites on the web that do this.
My initial thoughts would be to not worry too much. Google will know this is a widespread issue and will deal with it accordingly. I would recommend looking at setting up canonicalisation on your site as this will help Google understand the issue and it will help Google show which page is the relevant one to index. This will effectively eliminate the issue for you. If you want any details on how canonical works see here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en. Or PM me and I will see if I can help.
To answer your second question, I would not worry about the amount of external links. Having the limit at 100 links per page (as moz recommends in its on page analyser) is an age old tip because when Google was much smaller and had less server resource it rarely crawled past the 100 link. Here's a video that shows they dropped this guideline. Nowadays this is not the case. As long as you are not linking to hundreds of pages for SEO or Search Engine manipulation reasons then I would leave it as it is.
Hope this helps.
Adam
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
-
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
Should I use LocalBusiness schema on my home page or Contact Us page?
I know I should only use Organization schema on one page of my site, but I'm not sure if I should use it on the Home page or use LocalBusiness schema on the home page. I was thinking of adding LocalBusiness schema to home page, Organization schema to About Us page and Corporate Contact Schema to Contact us page. Thoughts? Is there a best practice? I can't seem to find much information on what's best to use where.
Local SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Descriptive TLDs
Hi there, We have a variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Our business has two monetising areas, a clinic and a shop. To market them, we do recipes, blogs and social media, rather than relying primarily on SEO, but we do want to up our SEO game. Our primary site is www.example.co.uk This is Wordpress and where we market the clinic, host the recipes and blogs, and is our main email domain. Our second site is Woocommerce, at www.example.shop Our shop market is primarily in the UK, but we seem to pick up a fair amount of international business, partly because the clinic does virtual consultations to many countries. The shop is online only. We have physical clinics across the UK. Both sites cross link extensively, eg with blogs advertising products in the shop. The branding is intentionally related yet different, because they have very distinct functions, and eg. I don’t want to clutter the interface or distract people with blog or clinic once we have funnelled them to the shop checkout. I would also like to separate the blog and recipe elements from the clinic, using a slightly different theme with different functions. We use a lot of plugins, and the more we aggregate functions on the same Wordpress instance, the more likely something is to go wrong. I like the new TLDs because they are more “human”, and they identify where you are and what you are doing more clearly. We do email footers with links to example.clinic (redirected to www.example.co.uk) and example.shop. They are simple and explain what is going on. Conversely, shop.example.co.uk is not so easy to write or read out. www.example.co.uk/shop looks like an afterthought, rather than a shop in its own right with its own home page. So there would have to be a really good SEO reason for me to merge the shop into the main site with reverse proxy or multisite. Do you think that there is such a good reason? If not, by the same token, would it make sense to separate out example.blog or even naturedoc.recipes from example.clinic and use .co.uk as a single page portal to the three separate sites? My instinct, for what it is worth is that Google is smart enough to have started thinking that domains linked by topic TLDs can be equivalent to subdomains, and to recognise that we are not trying to build links from spammy unrelated sites. My last area is about human behaviour... Are people are as happy to click on or type in a new TLD like .clinic as a local .co.uk one? ...when (a) it is not a discredited TLD like .biz, and (b) it gives them more insight into what they will get when they arrive. And since we have the .uk domain, should we switch to this shorter version at the same time? I already use it for custom shortcodes (eg. example.uk/fte6 for people to type in from printed material or instagram). I can’t help feeling .uk has been unsuccessful, and its use now looks bad, even if it is shorter. Many thanks in advance.
Local SEO | | MizRabble0 -
Buying a .IE domain and forward to .com domain?
Hi, One of our clients currently owns a .com domain and they are interested in marketing into the Irish market. They have asked us if they should buy a .IE domain name and then forward it onto their .com one. I know that Google has been clamping down on people who use the 'Backdoor' method of buying 100's of keyword rich domains and forwarding them onto their website but would it really make a difference if they just bought one .IE domain? Keen to know if anyone has done this sort of thing before and their experience. Thanks
Local SEO | | O2C0 -
Website pages for different cities
HI, Is it ok to have pages on my website that are specifically targeted for one town? Does Google frown on this? is there any thing I should know about doing this, like, does it hurt my seo efforts in anyway? I would be making each page as resourceful as possible to the reader., by Including unique content etc Thanks in advance:)
Local SEO | | MissThumann0 -
Transfer Local SEO rankings to another domain
The question is specifically about local rankings, not the organic ones. My client recently acquired another Law firm. Acquired firm's website is ranking well in Google local and has a decent SEO authority. Its Google mybusiness page is also established and has a lot of positive reviews. Client's main website is comparatively new and doesn't currently rank well in Google local. The Google mybusiness page is sort of incomplete and doesn't have any review. Both businesses are listed in local directories (client's main business is listed in lot less directories and has fewer citations). The client wants to merge the newly acquired website with his main website, without losing Google local rankings the acquired website has. Or in other words, transfer newly acquired website's local rankings to his main site. Client wants to transfer the website to his main website in all cases while minimizing the damage. I'd transfer acquired website's content to main website, properly map the pages and place 301 redirects. Regarding Google my business pages, what would you suggest? I can either update main business NAP and Website address in Acquired business's mybusiness page, or transfer acquired business's mybusiness ratings to main mybusiness page via this form: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_move_reviews I've also heard that Google support can merge two business page, however not sure about that. I'd also need to update the business listings and citations. Could you please suggest the best way of doing this? And have you practically tested it?
Local SEO | | Woofire0 -
Local Pages for National (Service) Companies
Hi there, I was wanting to know the value of local pages for a service company that operates nationally. They do not have a phone number or address, but they do maintain employees in each of the locations and are thus, keen to emphasize this fact with location pages. The location pages merely explain that they have staff in each of the locations and experience working there, alongside a variety of information that is relevant to the industry/market in that location. None of the location pages are currently ranking well at all - in fact, all of the ones I've looked at so far have had a page authority of 1. Most of the major towns, cities and counties for the entire UK have been covered which means the location pages constitute a significant proportion of all of the pages for the entire site. My questions are: Is a national service company likely to benefit from having location pages? And could it even be something they could be penalised for at some point down the line? Thanks very much, in advance, for your time. Kind Regards, Tom
Local SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0