Subdomains and SEO

[gotchamobi]

My question has 2 parts: 1) Can you optimize a subdomain template site (a company is providing us with a template site they provide many other salespeople, but we can control the meta and content on each page), and 2) Does forwarding and masking another domain to the subdomain in question, hurt my SEO efforts?

[DirkC]

this is the way I understood it - if you can add the canonical url to each page it is ok. If you can't add the canonical you shouldn't mask the url as you will be creating duplicate content as each page is accessible on 2 urls, the subdomain and your personal domain

[gotchamobi]

Thanks so much for the response. Just to be sure I understand, for the mypersonalsite.com redirecting to the template site, there is a mask involved, so you never actually see the templated site's URLs.

So instead of mypersonalsite.com redirecting to templatedsite.bigsite.com, it shows mypersonalsite.com once redirected and instead of showing templatedsite.bigsite.com/page1 it shows mypersonalsite.com/page1

So does defining the canonical still work in this case? And it would need to be defined on all the templated sites URL's correct? We can access each page on the templated site, however, I'm not sure we can access the head section though, just page content.

[DirkC]

Hi Chris

you can optimize a subdomain-  although it's always better to use the main domain. In your case it depends a bit on the flexibility you have to create unique content  within the provided template.

i assume that the second question is about accessing the same content using a different url - it's not necessarily a problem & can even help from SEO point of view if you are able to define the canonical url on the template site

Situation would then be: template site mysubdomain.bigsite.com - all urls have canonical to mypersonalsite.com -> all the urls of the template site will be indexed on mypersonalsite.com

if you cannot define the canonical url it's duplicate content and should then be avoided.

rgds

Dirk