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
-
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
MaxMind GeoIP SEO Impact
Hi, A client has mentioned that they are working with their design company to create three different hompage versions (one for Scotland, one for England and one for international visitors) which will be shown to the visitors dependent upon their locations. They are working in connection with MaxMind who I have not come across before. My question is would this have a negative impact on SEO?
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | manutx0 -
Can subdomains boost the main domain?
HI I know that having a strong domain can help when creating sub domains, but can it also work the other way round? Can having a number of strong sub domains help the top level domain's quality and history? My reason for asking is that I have half a dozen domains which have been used for various projects, and still are, which have involved having a landing page on the root domain and running dozens of sub domains. These subdomains, across 6 root domains, have about 500,000 pages indexed. I have now decided I should do something with the root domain so am wondering if there are any benefits I would have gained from my initial approach. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Newly appointed SEO at a small company
Hi. I am new to the world of SEO, and SEOmoz has already taught me a lot. I am a newly appointed in house SEO at www.completeoffice.co.uk. They want to rank for the keyword office interior design, but I noticed that all the keywords they are trying to rank for, there homepage shows up on search results. So I optimised the on page SEO of their website for the specific office interior design page. http://www.completeoffice.co.uk/interiors.aspx. I took it from a grade F to a grade A. Currently they are showing up just outside the top 50 for office interior design, and its the homepage in the google results. Now I have made these changes and on page optimised the SEO for this page to be solely for office interior design keyword will the search results change so that it is the specific office interior design page showing and linking to , or will it always remain the home page. I have optimised many of the other pages in this way so that a keyword will link to the relevant page and rank for that relevant page, rather than get the home page to rank for 30 keywords. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | CompleteOffice1 -
Restaurant menu SEO: PDF or HTML?
Is it better to use a PDF or hard code restaurant menus (or any document for that matter) in HTML? I want the content to be indexed and thought PDF was the way to go for several reasons, but I wanted to get confirmation on this before I move forward.
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Does IP Changes Affect SEO Metrics?
Okay, So yesterday I asked a question about setting up custom error pages in IIS 6.0 to properly do a 24 hour 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable. With no answer, (not to the despair of the community as the question has NO simple or easy answer 🙂 So after a night of dreaming about solutions 🙂 I realized that we have the ability to just clone the site.... So basically it would just become a redundant server or mirror site for 24 hours. With all that being said the question is..... What SEO pitfalls might I encounter from this if any I suspect none as load balancing and redundancy is a fact of life in the WEB world, especially since it will be a MAX of 24 hours downtime for maint.
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780