Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
-
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
-
All of the content that you have on a subdomain and all of the links that the subdomain attracts could have been working to strengthen your root domain.
In Google you are going out to fight the heavyweights. Do you want to do that with a couple light weight platforms or do you want to unite the clans and attack with all that you got. That is the choice that you make by running subdomains.
I moved and redirected my subdomains into folders on the main website a long time ago and the results were great.
-
Under certain circumstances it can harm the rankings and SEO performance of your main site. In terms of low-end technical SEO issues like broken links and stuff, that usually wouldn't be a problem (unless it were creating loads of broken links from the sub-site, to the main site). If you had a more substantial issue like an active penalty (manual GSC notification) or a malware threat (or hacked content) on your subdomain, that could assuredly harm the main site's rankings. Except in extreme circumstances such as these - I wouldn't worry about it too much
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
-
Can 'follow' rather than 'nofollow' links be damaging partner's SEO
Hey guys and happy Monday! We run a content rich website, 12+ years old, focused on travel in a specific region, and advertisers pay for banners/content etc alongside editorial. We have never used 'nofollow' website links as they're no explicitly paid for by clients, but a partner has asked us to make all links to them 'nofollow' as they have stated the way we currently link is damaging their SEO. Could this be true in any way? I'm only assuming it would adversely affect them if our website was peanalized by Google for 'selling links', which we're not. Perhaps they're just keen to follow best practice for fear of being seen to be buying links. FYI we now plan to change to more full use of 'nofollow', but I'm trying to work out what the client is refering to without seeming ill-informed on the subject! Thank you for any advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Jim0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven87
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.com So 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?0 -
Does having multiple Domain aliases hurt SEO rank ?
Our company having multiple domain aliases (DIfferent TLD) like example.com, .net, .org, .club, .win to one site (Same Content). We do this because our country ISP is blocking a few of the domain aliases. Question: Does this hurt the SEO rank? What approach is the best for us to gain SEO Rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | missionunpossible0 -
Do industry specific domains help SEO?
Hi everyone, I've looked for an answer to this but I can't find one. Hopefully someone can help! I have a new client that is a builder. They currently have a .co.uk domain (e.g. businessname.co.uk) Would it help them if the website was businessname_.builders_ instead? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebsiteAbility0 -
We're planning a major website redevelopment - SEO Considerations?
We're currently planning a website rehaul, with a new site to be designed and implemented on our existing Drupal 7 platform. I've outlined the following areas to consider: Listing out top content by traffic, conversions, ranking and bounce rates to ensure top content continues to get relevant links throughout site (in particular high internal PA links!). Maintaining a specific KW target for each page Ensuring on-page SEO guidelines remain (i.e. img alt tags, headings and page titles) Having a low page load speed Ensuring architecture of site is built around our keyword methodology What else I need to be aware of? I'm predicting a drop in traffic as this tends to follow redesigns but looking to make this as minimal as possible. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz0 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0 -
SEO and marketing for a company that doesn't want to promote their primary website
Hi All! One of my new clients is in a semi-grey-hat industry, and is in perpetual danger of having their real websites (of which they have several), blocked by the Chinese firewall (which is where their target market is). So their idea is to use neutral sites to write information (Squidoo, article site, maybe a stand-alone WP site with a few pages) and promote those pages. The idea being that China is less likely to block those sites, and then the link to the actual website from those pages could always be changed if China blocks the website listed. I'm a little dubious as to how feasible this is - how do you promote a Squidoo page? Or an article on an article site for semi-competitive keywords? Besides on-page SEO (which may not be enough), is there anything you can really do post-Penguin? If anyone has any ideas as to the above - or as to how else to effectively market sites when you can't market the site and brand directly, I'd be very happy to hear. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840