Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Exact match subdomains
-
Hi, I have seen significant SEO benefits from owning exact match domains and was wondering whether exact match subdomains hold the same (or some) of these benefits?
eg.
halloweencostumes.co.uk vs. halloween [dot] costumes.co.uk
Many thanks.
-
I agree. But at the same time because its still on the main domain which has authority i have a hard time believing the engines don't trust the url more as a sub-domain vs a bran new url.
-
Thanks for your response. Interesting to hear about your experience with exact match sub-pages. Sub-pages benefit from URL structure and domain authority. Would be also be interesting to compare with exact match subdomains where weight isn't passed from the root domain and relies primarily on URL keywords.
-
Hey Mate,
One of my clients has around 20 terms on his site that we created exact match sub-pages for which are basically:
These rank very well, I can't say they are as good as an actual exact domain match but they def help get us ranking faster because the keywords in the url at all create authority.
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
-
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Best geotargeting strategy: Subdomains or subfolders or country specific domain
How have the relatively recent changes in how G perceives subdomains changed the best route to onsite geotargeting i.e. not building out new country specific sites on country specific and hosted domains and instead developing sub-domains or sub-folders and geo-targeting those via webmaster tools ? In other words, given the recent change in G perception, are sub-domains now a better option than a sub-folder or is there not much in it ? Also if client has a .co.uk and they want to geo-target say France, is the sub-domain/sub-folder route still an option or is the .co.uk still too UK specific, and these options would only work using a .com ? In other words can sites on country specific domains (.co.uk , .fr, .de etc etc) use sub-folders or domains to geo-target other countries or do they have no option other than to develop new country specific (domains/hosting/language) websites ? Any thoughts regarding current best practice in this regard much appreciated. I have seen last Febs WBF which covers geotargeting in depth but the way google perceives subdomains has changed since then Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Will errors on a subdomain effect the overall health of the root domain?
As stated in the question, we have 2 sub domains that contain over 2000 reported errors from SEOMOZ. The root domain has a clean bill of health, and i was just wondering if these errors on the sub-domains could have a negative effect on the root domain in the eyes of Google. Your comments will be appreciated. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
How to move my blog from subdomain to subfolder?
Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings. The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog. This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess? Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0
