How important is it to create a subdomain?
-
I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar success?
Also, Panda aside, how important do you think it is to separate different types of content out on separate subdomains?
-
"I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains"
The above responses are very valid. I would question whether there is ANY link between Panda and subdomains - as the original question asked.
-
Hi,
You do not need to worry if you do not have duplicate content on your website.
the thing abotu subdomains is that google treats them as a seprate site so if you have a big site with strong authority and you start ripping apart your content to make sub domains it is very risky.
My advice is to only worry if you have loads of poor quality content, then you need to think about a sub domain strategy.
Regards,
James Norquay
-
I think you should only use the subdomain tactic if you need to divide your lower quality content from your higher quality content. This may allow your higher quality content to rank while your lower quality content stays penalized.
See http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/07/wsj-wtf-google-panda-subdomains.htm for more details.
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
-
Subdomain vs totally new domain
Problem: Our organization publish maps for public viewing using google maps. We are currently getting limited value from these links. We need to separate our public and private maps for infrastructure purposes, and are weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of separating by domain or sub domain with regards SEO and infrastructure. Current situation: maps.mycompany.com currently has a page authority of 30 and mycompany.com has a domain authority of 39. We are currently only getting links from 8 maps which are shared via social media whereas most people embed our maps on their website using an iframe which I believe doesn't do us any favour with SEO. We currently have approx 3K public maps. Question: What SEO impact can you see if we move our public maps from the subdomain maps.mycompany.com to mycompanypublicmaps.com? Thanks in advance for your help and happy to give more info if you need it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eSpatial0 -
XML Sitemaps - how to create the perfect XML Sitemap
Hello, We have a site that is not updated very often - currently we have a script running to create/update the XML sitemap every time a page is added/edited or deleted. I have a few questions about best practices for creating XML sitemaps. 1. If the site is not updated for months on end - is it a bad idea to force the script to update i.e. changing the dates once a month? Will google noticed nothing has changed just the date i.e. all the content on the site is exactly the same. Will they start penalising you for updating an XML sitemap when there is nothing new about the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
2. Is it worth automating the XML file to link into Bing/Google to update via webmaster tools - as I say even if the site is never updated?
3. Is the use of "priorities" necessary?
4. The changefreq - does that mean Google/Bing expects to see a new file ever month?
5. The ordering of the pages - the script seems pretty random and put the pages in a random order - should we make it order the pages with the most important ones first? Should the home page always be first?
6. Below is a sample of how our XML sitemap appears - is there anything that we should change? i.e. all marked up properly? This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url></urlset> Hope someone can help enlighten us to best practices0 -
Folder or subdomain for new e-commerce addition
Our main content site has 5K pieces of unique content all targeting our market. We are planning to add e-commerce as a source monetizing our audience. Should we place the new commerce platform within a subdirectory or subdomain? The layout we are considering is... shop name: Brand Name Market http://www.brandname.com/market/ http://market.brandname.com I am also considering something like: http://www.brandname.com/market/ aggregating product details and content from http://market.brandname.com/ with rel= back to the subdomain if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ejovi0 -
How could I create this? Would it be a chrome extension?
I do a lot of checking for duplicate content on sites. I use chrome and generally I highlight a phrase, do right click and then "Search Google for...". However, I would like to have a quick shortcut where I can search Google for a phrase that is enclosed in quotes. Is there a chrome extension for this? If not, can I build one? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Bing flags multiple H1's as an issue of high importance--any case studies?
Going through Bing's SEO Analyzer and found that Bing thinks having multiple H1's on a page is an issue. It's going to be quite a bit of work to remove the H1 tags from various pages. Do you think this is a major issue or not? Does anyone know of any case studies / interviews to show that fixing this will lead to improvement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) - http://www.thesquarefoot.com We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers. TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
How can I create a redirection on IIS?
Hi, I want to know how to create a server side 301 redirection on IIS7. I found on google the below details; IIS Redirect In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Enter the redirection page Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" Click on 'Apply' But couldn't find anything like that. Can anyone help me out. thanks & regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VipinLouka780 -
Mobile subdomain recommendations - Mobile SEO
My company is moving forward with creating a subdomain for mobile visitors (m.examplesite.com). I know there is much discussion on subdomain vs one url with different style sheets. That ship has sailed and the subdomain is the way we are proceeding. Google appears to recommend leaving both sites open to the normal Googlebot and redirecting the mobile bot to the mobile site (as we will be redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile subdomain). Has anyone had experience with this. Any duplicate content issues? Does anyone feel strongly that the normal Googlebot should be blocked from the mobile site (this seems to go against Google's recommendations)? It seems like another option is to use the canonical tag and let the search engines know the traditional site is the canonical page/version. Any recommendations? Any other issues that should be considered?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btdavis0