Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
-
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing
The situation is as follow:
For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them.
Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.comSo I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are:
- no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages)
- duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client)
- impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console.
- Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google.
Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of?
The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected.
So my questions basically are:
1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed? -
Yes, I'm ware on that one and as we speek it's getting fixed. But I'm curious on x amount of irrelevant subdomains on rankings
-
Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them.
Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of?
The issues that you are thinking about here are only issues that might impact example.com.
You need to think about issues that impact your clients. Your clients' domains should have the only copy of their content being indexed by Google. Allowing their content to be indexed could cause problems for the client. The duplicate copy could cause pages on their domain to go into the supplemental index. The duplicate copy could also cause some of their traffic to go to your site.
I would not use a hosting service that allows it.
So my questions basically are:
1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
Just stop this practice of publishing client backups. Find another backup method. The impact that you should be worrying about is clients who are aware of this problem finding out about it and complaining loudly.
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
-
Which is the best SEO plugin for joomla
Hey there, can any one please tell me the Best plugin i can choose For joomla?? I am going use sh404ref & 2nd one i am thinking is EFSEO. If besides This do u know any Good One, Please Help to choose Best Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Hypothetical SEO Question
I am running a website for a law firm. It has been running for many, many years and has plenty of backlinks and authority. I then create a standalone website for a specific type of case that the law firm is handling. On that website, I have a page that copies some of the attorney bio text from the main website. How much of a negative impact will this standalone website have on the main website as far as duplicate content issues are concerned? Please explain your answer in detail. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Recommended SEO companies
I'm trying to find SEO companies to partner with. Are they any you can recommend that are near San Diego?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoniHicksAssociates0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
SEO Tools for Content Audit
Hi i'm looking for a tool which can do a full content audit for a site for instance - Find pages which: • Lack text content. • Finds pages with lengthy meta descriptions • Finds missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags . • Duplicate meta descriptions. • Find images with no alt text Are there any tools besides the ones on SEMOZ which can enable me to do a full content audit on factors like these. Or any SEO audit tools out there which you can recommend. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors... Can a server migration change rankings? Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thos0030 -
Effect of URL change on Website
Hello we are developers and we have just created a new webpage for a client of us. The problem is that we can not replace the old one by the new one, cause our client has developed over 15 satellite pages that calls directly to the code of the old page. If we completly remove the old page we will make those 15 pages go down. Those pages are working over domains specially register for SEO reasons. For example Main page is www.euroair.es Satellite page is www.aireacondicionadodaikin.com Satellite page has pretty good ranking for search term "aire acondicionado daikin" As I told you, we have a new page but we can not make the page work over root domain. So we thought we could make it work over www.euroair.es/es, and make a redirection 301 of homepage and another important inner pages. We chose "/es" folder because it seems like a language folder, but we are not very sure of the effects of pages working on that folder instead of working on root directory. What do you think? Is this matter important or doesn't? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite.com0 -
Slooooow motion SEO impact
I could do with some help if anyone's got a minute. We've got this one client, no matter what we did (and we worked very hard on this site), nothing would really move. You'd get the usual fluctuations, and maybe some very small progress at times. This went on for an age... much, much longer than usual (and it wasn't even that competitive for keywords). Then suddenly, "Bam!" it shot up like a rocket for all it's main keywords and has stayed there since... more or less (and this was over a year ago). It was as if all the work we'd been doing was building up behind a door and then the door flew open so it could take affect. Anyway... it seems to be happening again, just to a different client with a different website (at least I hope that's what's happening or it might just stay non-affected by anything we do forever). We've checked everything. There's no crawling problems, again it's not all that competitive, the site already has some pretty good trust and authority, and it already ranks well for a bunch of stuff. The site and pages have plenty of age behind them too. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0
