Migrating login page from website: SEO impact
-
Our current login page looks like www.website.com/log-in/. We are planning to migrate it to a sub directory login.website.com. For years, our login page is the top landing with highest visits after homepage. If we migrate this now, are we going to loose traffic and drop in rankings?
Thanks
-
To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what your question is. The subdomain will still be under your domain. It will be the same website but a part of it will be on a different server. The traffic will count for the domain. Even if Google would see this subdomain as a different site (which I don't will be) you still don't have what to worry about because you would have used 301 redirects and all the links will point to the new subdomain. So all you really have to do is change all the links that you can (which lead to the login page) and then do a 301 redirect from the old one to the new one. This is safe in terms of SEO and you don't have to worry about losing your position in the SERPs. Hope this helps!
-
Apologies, I'm not entirely sure of got your point. Do you mean you want the URL locked away so only a favoured few can access it? I.e. not a general website login.
If you use 301s highly likely Google will find the new login page, If that answers your query?
One point like to throw in here that a penetration tester will tell you that obscurity isn't security. Meaning that just puting the login form on another URL/Website/IP won't increase the security very much, if at all, especially if someone is determined.
-
We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. I wonder the traffic to this separate page counts into website. Will 301 redirect will make sure the traffic to login page count as our website traffic?
-
We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. Still 301 redirect makes the traffic to be counted as our website traffic?
-
If you 301 properly and phrase the page properly with text and tags it shouldn't be a problem, you may see an initial drop but should recover again.
With branded queries you are normally pretty safe, especially if you have a strong online presence.
Subdomains can cause a bit of a headache if they're not done right, there seems to be a bit of a trend to move away from subdomains of late in favour of putting everything on one domain. Google will sometimes see subdomains as a separate website.
-
Hi Alick,
We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. I wonder the traffic to this separate page counts into website.
-
You might drop in rankings in process of site migration. It depends how well the migration is conducted. Make sure to change as many of those links leading to www.website.com/log-in/ as you can. Where you have a link to www.website.com/log-in/, change it to login.website.com to avoid too many 301's on your website. Also, you should have a good reason for migration to subdomains because you will loose domain authority. Subdomains are treated as a new different websites with zero DA and you need to build it again.
-
No If you use 301 redirection you are not going to loose traffic and drop ranking because it is your brand related query and you will always appears on top.
In your case users query might be like this yout brandname + login and other similar search queries.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Hi! Don't worry. As long as you implement the redirects correctly, you will not have a problem. "A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website." Read more here -> https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.
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
-
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
Parallax websites - good for SEO?
A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax. What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com) I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand. I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site. What do you guys think?
Web Design | | wojkwasi0 -
Dynamic pages -windows server
Hi all, Hope I get an answer on clients site which I believe is hosted on a windows shared server. The output of the site is something like this: http://www.domainname.com/catering-sub.asp?maincate_id=6&maincate_name=Barware I am looking to get a URL friendly output for the site - as far as my knowledge I believe Htaccess doesn't work on this type of hosting? thoughts? Thanks in advance
Web Design | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Do pages with low PA effect DA?
I was looking into raising my firm's Domain Authority and I had a thought. I was wondering if our very low PA pages are bringing the overall DA down? Our homepage is at 43 currently and the DA is 32. We have quite a few pages and I am trimming a little fat in the deep pages currently. I was wondering what would be the result in terms of DA I am also starting an aggressive initiative to blog more and try to attract links through guest posting and HARO (Hep A Reporter Out). I understand that many people will say DA is not a metric your should necessarily build around. But, while I am fighting for rankings in a very competitive vertical, I assume a higher DA is better, no? From everything I have read on Moz over the years, they say that the DA metric is the one that tries to encompass a multitude of factors, similar to the way something more complex like the Google algorithm does. So, I assumed finding small gains in DA could be beneficial to the site's rankings and traffic I tried to go into detail and get specific here because I know how many bad questions are asked daily. Thanks anyone and everyone for the help, I do thoroughly appreciate the Moz community
Web Design | | BossArrighi0 -
Splash Pages For App Downlowds
Hi, We currently have a very simple splash page that Android and iPhone users see when they land on our homepage. The screen gives them the option to download our app or move on to the full website. If they choose to go to the site they are redirected to our homepage. Is this going to have any negative impacts on our rankings? I'm not sure how the Google bot treats this type of page. We have also talked about replacing the splash page with a modal window, but I'm concerned that this will increase the load time of the home page on mobile devices. Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation or any advice? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Cash4Books0 -
Video SEO?
What is the best way to get SEO benefits from video? Which service is best? YouTube, Vimeo or any other? Or is best just to upload direct to my own site? But then how would I handle mobile devices i.e. iPad and iPhone? How does one go about marketing a video? Thanks
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Dynamic pages and code within content
Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click. Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.
Web Design | | tgraham0 -
HTML5, semantic web & SEO
HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>
Web Design | | TahoeMountain400
