What would you do if a site's entire content is on a subdomain?
-
Scenario:
- There is a website called mydomain.com and it is a new domain with about 300 inbound links (some going to the product pages and categories), but they have some high trust links
- The website has categories a, b, c etc but they are all on a subdomain so instead of being mydomain.com/categoryA/productname the entire site's structure looks like subdomain.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname
- Would you go to the effort of 301ing the subdomain urls to the correct url structure of mydomain.com/category/product name, or would you leave it as it is?
Just interested as to the extent of the issues this could cause in the future and if this is something worth resolving sooner than later.
-
Thanks for suggestions, appreciated!
-
Yes,exactly that structure
-
That is the best answer, you are right. Maybe I would first contact the sites that link to mine.
-
Here is what I would (probably) do.....
If there is just one subdomain... I would 301 redirect it to the root domain.
If there are multiple subdomains.... I would redirect each of them to a folder.
I would then try to get the links changed to directly hit the proper content in the proper folder.
-
Great question Kerry,
A great factor is how many subdomains do you exactly have. If not above 50 I think interlinking the content well should be enough. There are sites that use lots of subs and are succesful (look at cragslist.org for example). If you have a lot more subdomians I would further investigate the links: how many do exactly go to subdomians. Cause if you redirect only these links will no longer provide about 10-15% of the link juice they do provide now. You can estimate the ratio of the fallback.
Hope I could give you some points to consider, regretfully making a decision you are facing now is never easy. I hope you will be able to solve the problem.
-
Hi there,
So just to make sure. The structure would be as follows:
shop.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname
shop.mydomain.com/categoryB/productname1
???
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
-
These days on Google results, it also shows the site map. I submitted my company's sitemap and it still does not show?What am I doing wrong?
Look at the image in the link. I want my company to look like the "pluralsight" website in Google. I want it to show the sitemap. I have already submitted the sitemap to Google few days back, what am I doing wrong? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=pluralsight&oq=pluralsight&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.11024j0j8
Technical SEO | | Deein0 -
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers. Is this considered duplicate content? Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it? Should they be indexable? If not how do I control?
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Google couldn't access your site because of a DNS error
Hello, We've being doing SEO work for a company for about 8 months and it's been working really well, we've lots of top threes and first pages. Or rather we did. Unfortunately the web host who the client uses (who to recommended them not to) has had severe DNS problems. For the last three weeks Google has been unable to access and index the website. I was hoping this was going to be a quickly resolved and everything return to normal. However this week their listing have totally dropped, 25 page one rankings has become none, Google Webmaster tools says 'Google couldn't access your site because of a DNS error'. Even searching for their own domain no longer works! Does anyone know how this will effect the site in the long term? Once the hosts sort it out will the rankings bounce back. Is there any sort of strategy for handling this problem? Ideally we'd move host but I'm not sure that is possible so any other options, or advice on how it will affect long term rankings so I can report to my client would be appreciated. Many thanks Ric
Technical SEO | | BWIRic0 -
Site: search doesn't return homepage first
When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty. Here is what I've checked/found: Toolbar pagerank remains strong. Homepage is indexed. SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty. Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed. Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions). Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage. Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it. Google safe browsing check shows no malware. Anything else I should check?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot
Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
Technical SEO | | aethereal
Asim0 -
What's the best free tool for checking for broken links?
I'm trying to find the best tool to check for broken links on our site. We have over 11k pages and I'm looking for something fast and thorough! I've tried Xenu and LinkChecker. Any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
Internal Linking: Site-wide VS Content Links
I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit. I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links. My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0