SEO implications of off-site secure Donation page
-
Hi Mozzers, I have a non-profit client that defends wildlife and public lands in the western US. The huge website is currently not responsive so we are working on that. In the meantime, we will be making the Action pages (such as Donations, Sign Petition, Get Newsletter) pages responsive. This will be housed under a new domain.
My question is, what are SEO best practices for doing this? Does it negatively impact SEO to have a visitor "booted" from a site to a second secure site? Does Google know that the Donation site is in fact fulfillment and is linked to the original site?
Also, what about domain implications? Is it best to have the name of the non-profit in the domain or sub, like this: https://saveanimals.secure.com/donate?
Thanks everyone!
-
Hi James,
Great question! My two cents would be as follows:
Firstly, I'm assuming that there is no way that you can make the responsive pages show up with the same domain as the current non-responsive site.
I'm guessing that you are building these pages on a different platform than the main site, but it is possible to use multiple platforms on a single domain (for instance, many websites build their blog on Wordpress and their main site using something different) - so I'm curious about why in this case you are choosing to make it a totally separate domain.
Assuming that this is the only way to do it, my first question would be: are these pages something that would be indexed normally on the main site? You mention they are 'Action' pages - search engines may not need to index transaction pages, for example, where the only purpose is to submit a payment or sign up for something. Unless you also expect these pages to rank as entry pages, but if users are navigating to these pages primarily from a different landing page, they may not be relevant to search engines at all.
If this is the case, and you are still concerned about appearing to send users to a different website, you could consider making the donate button to these pages initially link to a page on the existing domain (like www.maindomain.org/secure) which could then immediately redirect to the secure version. You could nofollow this link and block the transaction pages on the other domain from search (I usually see no reason to have purely transactional pages indexed, but I may be missing some context in this case.) However, this may run the risk of looking like you are trying to do something sneaky with redirects.
You could also include a note on the first page (the one the user is on before being taken to the secure site), next to that 'donate'/'signup' button/link that states "by clicking this link, you will be taken to our secure platform at 'domain.com' to complete your donation/signup".
I do like the idea of including the name of the charity in this secondary domain if possible, to help make it clear that they are connected. You could optimize the pages' meta data to include the name of the charity as well.
I don't believe there is a negative consequence (generally speaking) to sending a user off-site - unless you appear to be running some sort of 'doorway' page scheme, or using sneaky redirects to show Google one thing and the user something else. My one caveat: I'm not sure what you mean by "booting" the user- I could see it potentially seeming problematic if the user is automatically sent somewhere without choosing to navigate to the other domain...it could even fall under the category of 'malicious behavior'. But as long as the user is choosing to click on a link that takes them to a 'donate' or 'sign up' page, even if it's hosted on a different domain, I don't see that creating a major issue for Google.
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 my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Better for SEO to No-Index Pages with High Bounce Rates
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a New York City commercial real estate web site established in 2006. An SEO effort has been ongoing since September 2013 and traffic has dropped about 30% in the last month. The site has about 650 pages. 350 are listing pages, 150 are building pages. The listing and building pages have an average bounce rate of about 75%. The other 150 pages have a bounce rate of about 35%. The building and listing pages are dragging down click through rates for the entire site. My SEO firm believe there might be a benefit to "no-index, follow" these high bounce rate URLs. From an SEO perspective, would it be worthwhile to "no-index-follow" most of the building and listing pages in order to reduce the bounce rate? Would Google view the site as a higher quality site if I had these pages de-indexed and the average bounce rate for the site dropped significantly. If I no-indexed these pages would Google provide bette ranking to the pages that already perform well? As a real estate broker, I will constantly be adding many property listings that do not have much content so it seems that a "no-index, follow" would be good for the listings unless Google penalizes sites that have too many "no-index, follow" pages. Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Would be the network site map page considered link spam
In the course of the last 18 months my sites have lost from 50 to 70 percent of traffic. Never have used any tricks, just simple white-hat SEO. Anyway, I am now trying to fix things that hadn't been a problem before all those Google updates, but apparently now are. Would appreciate any help.. I used to have a network site map page on everyone of my sites (about 30 sites). It basically would be a page called 'our network' and it'll show a list of links to all of my other sites. These pages were indexed, had decent PR and didn't seem to cause any problem. Here's an example of one of them:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
http://www.psoriasisguide.ca/psoriasis_scg.html In the light of Panda and Penguin and all these 'bad links' I decided to get rid of most of them. My traffic didn't recover at all, it actually went further down. Not sure if there is any connection to what I'd done. So, the question is: In your opinion/experience, do you think such network sitemap pages could be causing penalties for link spam?0 -
Home Page or Internal Page
I have a website that deals with personalized jewelry, and our main keyword is "Name Necklace".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
3 mounth ago i added new page: http://www.onecklace.com/name-necklaces/ And from then google index only this page for my main keyword, and not our home page.
Beacuase the page is new, and we didn't have a lot of link to it, our rank is not so well. I'm considering to remove this page (301 to home page), beacause i think that if google index our home page for this keyword it will be better. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but i know that our home page have a lot of good links and maybe our rank will be higher. Another thing, because google index this internal page for this keyword, it looks like our home page have no main keyword at all. BTW, before i add this page, google index our main page with this keyword. Please advise... U5S8gyS.png j50XHl4.png0 -
Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin1 -
One page wordpress site - what are the steps for SEO
Hello, I am launching 5 sites with keyword exact domains. I am developing the sites on wordpress as one page sales funnel sites. What do I need to do to optimize my sites? Really appreciate any bullet points or directions. Tks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmaher0