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
-
# Tag - opacity and SEO impact
Hello,
Technical SEO | | Tiffany_Barn
I have a query animation 'fade-in-up' on my website: tiffanybarnard.com which moves the H1 tag slightly and fades it in from zero opacity to 1. Will this affect the SEO value of the H1 tag?
Thank you!0 -
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
Does using a reverse proxy to make a subdomain appear as a subdirectory affect SEO?
Using a reverse proxy only makes it appear that a subdomain is really a subfolder. However, links in the end remain the same. Does this have any negative (or positive) impact on SEO? Does it make it difficult from the blog's (subdomain's) sitemap or robots.txt file to be properly read by search engines?
Technical SEO | | rodelmo41 -
Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?
For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Marvellous0 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Https enabled site with seo issues
Hello, Is there a problem with seo bots etc to crawl and rank my wesbite well if the entire site is https enabled? We have a sign in button which results on the next page being https along with the main homepage and all other pages are https enabled. Any major setbacks to the seo strategies? How do I overcome these issues?
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo
hi there, i would talk about a specific topic: The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo Do you think that penalize seo activity ? i make you an example : a wordpress network of sites, domain based let the possibility to manage two domain on a single wp install, but even if the domains are separete, how does google see them, as separate or as a sigle domain?
Technical SEO | | guidoboem0 -
For SERPS which is better www or non www
Does it matter if i use to www or no www for SERPS on google? Obviously the redirection would be set up for either in the htaccess file.
Technical SEO | | apwade0