Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
-
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program.
One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots.
Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain?
What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
-
It is _possible _that a subdomain-based landing page could be cannibalizing rankings for specific terms from another page on your site. But if that landing page is actually that good for the term, its not necessarily a bad thing to have it ranking. If its ranking better than the pages you optimized for organic then maybe you should look at why that is (i.e. is it getting good/better links, are people sharing it around, is it better targeted than the organic page, is it more intuitive or has a better call to action, etc. etc.).
Now, if you really don't want thoe pages to rank in organic in place of optimized pages you created then you can very easily add a NoIndex tag to the page or exclude it from being crawled in Robots.txt
-
I am wondering what exactly you mean by "not considered for SEO"?
For many purposes, subdomains are considered as independent domains. If they are excellent landing pages for a specific search, I see no reason to exclude them from appearing in organic search; else a noindex might be wise. But I cannot really imagine a good page deserving that, assuming linking to your regular page and no cannibalisation.
In general I would slap on the basics - proper description, title, maybe social media data and be done with it unless I have a really good reason to assume they are actively harmful somehow.
Regards
Nico
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
-
SEO for Parallax Website
Hi, Are there any implications of having a parallax website and the URL not changing as you scroll down the page? So basically the whole site is under the same URL? However, when you click on the menu the URL does change? Cheers
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Impact of changing title and description.
When a site doesn't rank for keywords, is this advisable to keep changing the title, description and other on page factors of a page , say home page, until it ranks? Will that impact on improvement? Or else will it be counted in the negative side?
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Should I blow up our subdomain?
Hey folks, Several years ago we created a couple subdomains (ie, NEWS.URL.COM) and the posts that we put on this subdomain were very full of keyword anchor text links. Each post sometimes had 4-5. We haven't posted any new content on this subdomain for 3 years. After getting hit with manual "linking" penalty, we disavowed tons of links. But left the links on the subdomains alone. They really aren't providing any traffic and the content is poor, and not written by me. Do you think having these links is hindering our ranking efforts? I think I should just blow up this subdomain and get rid of it and all the keyword anchor links. Thoughts? Thanks ron Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Capitals URLs to Non Capitals...
Hi, I am working on a website which has capital urls and non capital urls which will be generating duplicate content, and I know it is better to use all lower case. The problem is that the page authority is better for the capital versions and I was wondering will it negatively impact the SEO of we 301 redirect the uppercase urls to the lowercase counterparts? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
SEO quandary advice needed
I'm in a bind, I've been working on my SEO for a while now and have finally landed on the top page for [fishing kayak reviews] in Google US. The problem is it's not the page I want to be ranked! I've recently updated my reviews component to a more robust system but the url is slightly different. Looking currently [Reviews without Images] http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-reviews is ranking in Google but I would like [Reviews with Images] http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review to rank instead. What would be the best solution for this problem? Adjust the url for [Reviews with Images] so it take the place of [Reviews without Images]? Do you think I will get any negative impacts from this?
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Client with Very Very Bad Onsite SEO
So one of my clients has a really really bad website from the technical perspective. I am talking over 75k in violations and warnings. Granted, the tagging is done well but any other SEO violation you can think of is occurring. In any case, they are building a new website, and I am on a retainer for a couple hours a week to do some link building. I am feeling like I am not getting anywhere. What is your advice? Should I keep on keeping on or advice the client to put SEO on hold until the technical issues are resolved. I feel like all of this link building isn't having the value that it could have with a site like this.
Technical SEO | | runnerkik0 -
Campaigns Domain and Subdomain... ?
I made two separate campaigns before I understood the meaning of "subdomain". I make one campaign for my www.com and another for my .com. I now realize I should have made the .com the domain and the www. the subdomain in the same campaign. Is there a way to edit this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | musicforkids0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0