Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
-
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles.
We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website)
I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it?
From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad.
How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
-
Hi Dylan,
Thanks for the reply. The community website does not exist anymore as a standalone website. It is now a sub-domain on our main website.
e.g. Before -
we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com
After -
we have http://community.mainwebsite.com
And this sub-domain has thousands of duplicate page titles.
Will that affect www.mainwebsite.com?
-
A subdomain site is treated as a different website than that of your root, but having a large amount of duplicate content (being a forum, I am assuming it does) can't be great. Is there any reason to keep the two operating at the same time (and not just 301'ing it)?
The old site would still be getting crawled and indexed so from an SEO perspective i guess that's a bad factor for your root domain as it'd be a direct competitor against your proper domain content.
Your best bet would be to either cannonical the content on the old domain/posts and/or 301 the old stuff to the new stuff as soon as possible. From both a user point of view (2 sites isconfusing) and a duplicate content point of view. I guess the main issue would be that you now have yourself as a competitor for content that should be getting found from your main domain.
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
-
Do you think this case would be of a duplicated content and what would be the consequences in such case?
At the webpage https://authland.com/ which is a food&wine tours and activities booking platform, primary content - services thumbnails containing information about the destination, title and prices of the particular services, can be found at several sub-pages/urls. For example, service https://authland.com/zadar/zadar-region-food-and-wine-tour/1/. Its thumbnail/card through which the service is available, can be found on multiple pages (Categories, Destinations, All services, Most recent services...) Is this considered a duplicated content? Since all of the thumbnails for services on the platform, are to be found on multiple pages. If it is, which would be the best way to avoid that content being perceived by Google bots as such? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZD20200 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add. Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content? Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How would I be able to move content from one domain to another?
I have a client that wants to migrate some of his site's content to a new domain, not all of the content, just some of it. This is not an address change. He wants to continue actively using the domain name where all this content currently resides, so it's not a matter of notifying search engines of an address change. The first thing that comes to mind is the use of the canonical tag, but it's not making sense. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UplinkSpyder0 -
Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com). Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza. A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrails
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza). I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google. Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking? Other things to note: It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results. I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this. Thanks0 -
The system shows duplicate content for the same page (main domain and index.html). Is this an error of SEOMOZ?
Should I be worried that this will affect SEO? Most sites redirect to the index.html page, right? [edited by staff to remove toolbar data]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moskowman0 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000