Backlinks from subdomain, can it hurt ranking?
-
I just started doing an SEO audit and noticed I have 40,000 some odd back links from an OLD version of our site that has been moved to a subdomain. The back links are for articles that already exist on our main site. I don't think Google is picking it up as duplicate content because that site isn't being crawled anymore. Could this hurt us SEO wise? I plan on removing the site, but how long after it's been removed should those back links disappear?
-
So there were no external links pointing to the subdomain admin.site.com ? If that's the case you could probably just noindex/nofollow the thing or let it 404. You could write an .htaccess rule to rewrite the domain name, but it's actually probably not worth it now that I think about it. The exception, of course, is if the subdomain had external links pointed to it.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure how feasible it is to redirect all of those urls. I know I could use regex but I just terminated the server that admin.site.com lived on so I can't access a robots.txt file anymore. Could I simply do a generic redirect admin.site.com -> site.com?
The subdomain was the same site and domain.
Thanks.
-
Okay, so the situation here is a little unclear, but the solution should be pretty straightforward.
If the admin.site.com was different from the original site domain, simply noindex/nofollow all of the pages on that domain. I recommend this over a robots.txt rule because it will actually remove them from the index. You can add a disallow all rule in robots.txt later once the site is completely noindexed.
If the admin.site.com was the same domain, I'd recommend redirecting all of those pages to the new URLs again and then launching a noindex/nofollow version blocked with robots.txt, though I'm not sure why it needs to exist for reference. If the subdomain was different from the old site you could also probably just noindex/nofollow all of it without the redirect. It's not best practice, but it's not that big a deal.
Hope this helps to answer.
-
If you took website down, you don't have to really do anything. Go to search console, do fetch as google on old admin subdomain, so google understands that it's not there anymore, and then just wait. Google will take those backlinks down.
-
The other thing I should note is that these site links do not show in Google when searching for the topic. I'm only seeing reported back links because the admin.site.com subdomain was blocked from Google crawling it for search results. Not sure if that makes a difference.
-
It says I can only demote 100 links, I need to demote upwards of 40,000 since the admin.site.com basically mirrored the actual site.
Now I'm a little confused.
I took the old site down, so I can use a robots.txt file there anymore.
So how can I disallow the entire admin subdomain and stop reporting back links?
-
I see. Read my response below and just use meta robots. it will help you out.
If you want to deindex those backlinks, you also can look into Google Search Console's demoting tool, but i don't think it's necessary.
-
Don't do that, disallow in robots.txt will NOT resolve indexing issue! What you need to use is meta robots. Noindex, nofollow. Watch this WBF on this subject:
-
Thanks
-
Hi there. Thanks for your response.
The pages exist on the new site, but the subdomain should have never been indexed. I noticed the back links in Google Console initially then confirmed with SEO Power Suite.
Basically we had site.com, then created a brand new site and migrated content over to newsite.com with 301 redirects from the old site. Then we wanted to keep the old site up for reference so we put it at admin.site.com. That is where all the 40,000 back links were coming from, admin.site.com, the old site.
There is no reason for us to redirect admin.site.com since the original articles were properly redirected. I guess however some how when the old site was taken down, Google must have indexed it still at the subdomain and counted those as backlinks.
-
Just make sure you add a robots.txt to the subdomain with
User-agent: * Disallow: / Or if the old site is not needed anymore, redirect the subdomain to your main domain and remove the site.
-
Hi there.
So, all the pages, from which those backlinks are coming from are non-existent anymore? have they been redirected? do they return 404s? Also, how did you find them? in Google Search Console or another tool?
So, if you found it in Google Search Console, and the original pages indeed have been removed and properly redirected, then it's just time delay by GSC. Otherwise (if those pages are crawlable), you should fix it.
Hope this makes sense.
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
-
Domain and page backlinks
Hello Everyone, I am new at SEO, and I am a bit confused with the following situation: I have domain, wordpress site on it, and I am building backlinks to it (testing). I do not have "home" page among pages in wordpress, if it means anything. When I build links, i use different anchor texts, but they all point to http://somethingsomething.net -Ahrefs shows that I have 830 backlinks from 45 domains, to my URL, which is http://somethingsomething.net (it is also my site's home page address) -MOZ;s Open site explorer, on the other hand, shows the following: 8 internal links and 0 external links for page specific metrics, and 878 total links 0 external for root domain metrics. -Google Webmaster tools shows 10 external links pointing to my site Please can someone explain to me what is happening here? Thanks a lot
Link Building | | ShivFriv770 -
Using Schema markup for backlinks
Hi, Is there any benefits for using schema markup for backlinks. Using for Article directory submission,Drupal Submission etc.. mUz1umK.png?1
Link Building | | ruddyhapiq0 -
How good are PR for getting authority backlinks ?
I have heard that Press release is one of the best source for getting high authority backlinks. Can anyone tell me about benefits of paid and free services offered by PR websites like PRweb or PRLOG ?
Link Building | | 01Aditya0 -
Can a sitewide backlink with exact anchor text penalize my website?
A few years ago, I exchanged a link with another website. In the meantime, this other website grew quite fast and now they just added a forum. The backlink from their website is sitewide and is using the anchor text "best web hosting". According to Google, this backlink now appears on 117,000 pages of the same domain. Yesterday, I just got a warning from Google: "We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines..." Could that sitewide link be one of the causes? Of course I know there are tons of bad links to my site but I'm wondering if I should get this one removed. Thank you for your help and sorry for my english. Stephane
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Subdomain vs. Subfolder
I would like to know, if anyone has a guess how much link juice I lose, if I use a subdomain instead of subfolder e.g. for a blog? If the blog of my main website is running on a subdomain e.g. blog.mainwebsite.com , my main domain would not benefit from the backlinks in the same way as with www.mainwebsite.com/blog . But has anyone a guess how much link juice I lose (maybe a guess in percent)? Many thanks in advance. Nadine
Link Building | | jameda0 -
Can You Recommend A Company Who Can Deliver Effective Link Bait Campaigns
I am looking for some recommendations on legitimate companies who can plan and execute an effective link bait campaign. Particularly I am looking for companies who have experience in producing infographics and distributing them for links. Thanks
Link Building | | SmarterSEO1 -
Can too many high PR links can hurt SEO
I recently accuired about 10 PR 4- 5 for my website after getting mostly PR 1-2 for the past 6 months. After a couple of day my rankings not only didn't go up, but actually went down really drasticly for many keyphrases that i used to rank at the top 3. Should i keep building those high PR links in the same fast pace, should i slow down? Or maybe i should even those out with some low PR link?
Link Building | | atohad0 -
Can PR0 backlinks be harmful?
Having a discussion on someone with whether or not PR0 backlinks can be harmful. Managed to find these blog posts that support my argument; http://geoland.org/2011/02/can-bad-links-hurt-your-google-rankings/ http://www.johnmcelborough.com/bad-links-good-site My argument: Things like article spinning and distribution are pretty much pointless. I used UniqueArticleWizard for a while when I first started out with SEO. It gave me around 1000 PR0 backlinks. A few weeks later my site was penalised from PR5 to PR2. Thanks
Link Building | | craven220