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Hi Julie,

I know that you are looking to hire someone, but I thought I would share some opinions here to get you thinking about what you want to spend your money on. I did an on-demand scan of your site on Moz to see what you are seeing in error reporting.

Issues that need fixed first I think the most important issues you need fixed first are your title tags, missing H1 tags and possibly your URL structure if you would like. That with focus on your on-page content will see large benefits to you and your company.

Redirect Issues

The redirect issues that I am seeing are actually redirect chains. This means that a link redirects to another redirect that finally lands on a page. There are two redirects in that process. You might want to investigate how you are redirecting those URLs from the previous site. I always think it is good to have those redirects in place from a previous site. You may want to use the links section of Moz to see if anyone is linking to your previous site. If you are certain there are no more links to your previous site, then you can safely remove those redirects.

Site Speed

I think it is important to understand site speed in rankings.  Yes, the faster the website the better user mobile experience. Right now, Google doesn't rank sites based on page speed difference. It only will effect rankings if your site is really bad. Google's expectations in their report is high because they want to push towards lightweight websites. Just because it ranks as slow doesnt mean that it will take effect on your rankings. A lot of cases, there will have to be some significant code changes to fix some of those areas. Scan your competitors site as well and see where they fall. Amazon only scores a 70 and they seem to do fine.

Also, speed fluctuates much like rankings fluctuate. A .3 second drop shouldn't be concerning. It is probably because of the pop-up you have installed announcing you are still open.

Summary

I would clean up your SEO tags and metadata first. Then you can start to worry about the redirect chains and finally maybe the site speed. If speed is a major priority for your firm, then you may want to consider a redesign built around a lightweight template.

I am sure there are lots of people on here willing to help. What is your website in question? I am happy to take a look and point you in the right direction.

Thank you for that reply. As you mentioned, I think I am more struggling with my task and that unified mission across all subdomains in an industry where only a handful of institutions can make that happen.

There was lots of good information to take from this. Thank you.

Hello all,

I work for a university and I my small team is responsible for the digital marketing, website, etc. We recently had a big initiative on SEO and generating traffic to our website.

The issue I am having is that my department only "owns" the www subdomain. There are lots of other subdomains out there. For example, a specific department can have its own subdomain at department.domain.com and students can have their own webpage at students.domain.com, etc.

I know the possibilities of domain cannibilization, but has any one run into long term problems with a similar situation or had success in altering the views of a large organization?

If I do get the opportunity to help some of these other domains, what is best to help our overall domain authority? Should the focus be on removing similar content to the www subdomain or cleaning up errors? Some of these subdomains have hundreds of 4XX errors.

Hi Julie,

I know that you are looking to hire someone, but I thought I would share some opinions here to get you thinking about what you want to spend your money on. I did an on-demand scan of your site on Moz to see what you are seeing in error reporting.

Issues that need fixed first I think the most important issues you need fixed first are your title tags, missing H1 tags and possibly your URL structure if you would like. That with focus on your on-page content will see large benefits to you and your company.

Redirect Issues

The redirect issues that I am seeing are actually redirect chains. This means that a link redirects to another redirect that finally lands on a page. There are two redirects in that process. You might want to investigate how you are redirecting those URLs from the previous site. I always think it is good to have those redirects in place from a previous site. You may want to use the links section of Moz to see if anyone is linking to your previous site. If you are certain there are no more links to your previous site, then you can safely remove those redirects.

Site Speed

I think it is important to understand site speed in rankings.  Yes, the faster the website the better user mobile experience. Right now, Google doesn't rank sites based on page speed difference. It only will effect rankings if your site is really bad. Google's expectations in their report is high because they want to push towards lightweight websites. Just because it ranks as slow doesnt mean that it will take effect on your rankings. A lot of cases, there will have to be some significant code changes to fix some of those areas. Scan your competitors site as well and see where they fall. Amazon only scores a 70 and they seem to do fine.

Also, speed fluctuates much like rankings fluctuate. A .3 second drop shouldn't be concerning. It is probably because of the pop-up you have installed announcing you are still open.

Summary

I would clean up your SEO tags and metadata first. Then you can start to worry about the redirect chains and finally maybe the site speed. If speed is a major priority for your firm, then you may want to consider a redesign built around a lightweight template.