Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
-
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains?
Example - our site is www.oursite.com
Dev site - development1.oursite.com
I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
-
I agree.
I have seen posts on SEOmoz and elsewhere throughout the SEO community that others are noticing drops in PR with no impact on traffic. I am not seeing a noticeable drop in traffic so the PR isn't concerning me too much but I am curious.
Have you noticed anything like this post Panda and do you think the panda update has any impact on the PR directly (I see how it would with poor content --> harder link building)? Again, I appreciate the feedback!
-
Another thought....
robots.txt shouldn't be used much but dev sites are a perfect example of where it should be used. Block crawlers from those dev sites.
-
Thank you, didn't even think of it in that sense (kind of have blinders on in this case and am looking for an easy answer, which probably doesn't exist). Appreciate the feedback!
-
Your subdomain is seen as a completely different site. Google does not assume your subdomain is related to your main site.
For example, if you visit wordpress.com you will see someone probably has the URL seo.wordpress.com. Whatever happens on that subdomain should not have any impact on any other subdomain or primary domain for wordpress.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
-
Client has franchisees on separate sub domains
Hi, a large client of mine has all of his franchisee network on sub domains and on separate wordpress websites (multi-sites). I have advised him that the best way forward is to use the main company .com domain and create sub folders for all of his franchisee areas. Does anyone foresee any problems with this going forward or do you have any advice to offer. I'd be interested in hearing what your verdict is on the subdomain vs subfolder war. Many thanks
Web Design | | johnos-journey0 -
Links not visible in "Google cache text version" but visible in "Fetch as Google" in Webmaster tool
Hi Guys, There seems some issue with the coding due to which Google is not indexing half of our menu bar links. The cached text version of http://www.99acres.com/ is not showing links present in dropdown "All India" , dropdown "Advice" and "Hot Projects" tab in blue bar on top menu whereas these links are visible in "Fetch as Google" in Google Webmaster tool. Any clue to why is there a difference between the links shown in Google webmaster and Google cache text version. Thanks in advance 🙂
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Wordpress Plugin To Capture Form Completion Data, Before Visitor Hits "Submit"?
Greetings MOZ Community: Visitors frequently start to enter contact information in the forms on our website, but then chicken out and don't hit the submit button. I noticed this watching the recordings of visitor web site visits using Mouse Flow. Is there a Wordpress Plugin that would allow us to capture data entered in forms, where the visitor does not finally hit the "submit" button? Obviously this would be very, very valuable as this scenario occurs in one out of three or four instances. Thanks!!!
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?
Hi, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic. Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy. Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want! The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again. An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2 With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at. I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!? I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link. What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble! My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this? And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery? Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated, Thanks Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
Blog on Subdomain or Subdirectory?
I was wondering what the SEO impact was of having a blog on a sub domain or sub directory. Which of the following is better? blog.companysite.com companysite.com/blog Personally, I like making the blog a more important part of the site so 2) is preferable; however, I don't know which one is best for SEO purposes. Do the search engines consider a subdomain as a different website? Can SEO authority be passed through each equally? What is your preference? Regards, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
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 -
Rankings Dropped After Redesign
Hi, I've recently redesigned our website with the main changes being sidebar changes and source ordering (making the main content appear before the sidebars). No URL changes have been made. A few days after making these changes our positions dropped heavily and have been dropping ever since. It's been a week and a half now and traffic is down by around 40%. Google has the new changes cached. Do people feel this just a temporary drop and will we rankings to go back at least or should we revert to the old structure? Website: http://www.diyorgasms.co.uk (NSFW) Thanks
Web Design | | diyorgasms0
