Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks and yes that's what i have now done with the microsites. So thank you very much for your advice.

The subdomains rank too well for me to bite the bullet on these too, or at least for the moment.

A slightly different and better suited analogy would be
"my main site advertises Hotels and each sub-domain advertises Hotels in London, etc, although my main site also advertises the same Hotels"

FYI my site has an Adult Theme (although not porn) which is why i am not posting URL's.

Thanks again!!
Jon

well i have bitten the bullet and 301'ed all but 2 of my micro sites.
I have kept unique tracking code on the sub-domains they all go to, so i can keep an eye on the traffic.
If it would be of help to others i will repost what happens to the traffic (if anything), so to help others make similar derisions.

I note Ryan said :
_"For your subdomains, as long as you are redirecting users to similar content on your main site, you should be absolutely fine. If the content does not exist on your main site, move the page from the subdomain to the main site. You should not experience any significant traffic loss. The future advantages of consolidation outweigh any minor loss which may occur. " _

My subdomains are all fully functional sites, but for specific areas, so the user only needs to go to the main site in order to search different areas or to contact us, etc.
Any page that gets duplicated (i,e. all profiles are on the main site, and profile for the specific area are duplicated on the subdomains ) is added with rel="canonical" to the page on the main site.
Is this what is meant by "as long as you are redirecting users to similar content on your main site" ?

All content also exists on the main site, so would this mean there is no consolidation to do? or do you think it would be better to 301 all subdomain to the main domain still?

sorry for all the questions and i am very grateful for all the advice

Best Regards
Jon

"Serves you right for not sharing with us!"

I will try to email you a glass later....

301 redirects are something im not sure if i know the best way to do them for SEO.
From a technical point all works fine, but im not sure if google will see this as every page 301'ed (although all redirect)

I use this code (or similar) in .htaccess
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^keyword-domain.co.uk$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.keyword-domain.co.uk$ RewriteRule (.*)$ http://subdomain.MainSite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

All pages now redirect to the main domain + whatever page they were trying to get to
(i.e www.keyword-domain.co.uk/whateverpage.php redirects to subdomain.MainSite.co.uk/whateverpage.php)

Does anyone know if this is correct or not. Ideally i don't want to have to redirect every page individually as there are 100's of pages and several domains and my .htaccess is large enough as it is.....
Or is there a better "wildcard" way of redirecting all pages?

Best Regards
Jon

Hello Francisco

Thank you for your opinions, they are much appreciated!

Best Regards
Jon

Hello Ryan

Thanks for your advice and sorry for calling you Jonny in my previous reply.
(Doh, that's my name....., will teach me to reply after drinking some of 'Scotland's Best').

Although it is not the news i wanted to hear, but i also know it to be true. You are of course right, in that it's only a matter of time before the doorway pages/micro sites come to bite me.
Do you think it would be OK for me to remove these micro sites and 301 them to the main domain (or relevant sub-domains if i am to keep some of the sub-domains)?
Or would it be better just to remove them and make no connection to our main site with them?

I will also try your test of 301 a couple of sub-domains for a month to see if this works too.
My only worry with this is, that the main site does not rank at all for i,e Manchester + Keywords, where as the sub-domains do.
(FYI the sub-domains are not just a few pages each of them can be around 100 pages and all pages within are optimised for Area + Keyword + Page Keyword, etc.)

I do hope i'm one of the good guys (white hat), and have always taken the attitude that SEO is 90% about good content and 10% about optimisation.

Thanks again
Jon

Hello Jonny

yes i think you understand me and thanks for the link to the doorway pages/micro sites.
I have used this method very effectively for many years, but it now look like Google disapprove, so i need to think very carefully about what i do with them.
(i dont think i fit totally in with the doorway description Google give, as their intent is not to funnel users, but they are intended to rank. But i do worry Google will not see it this way, so i hear what you say!)

The problem i have with "eliminating" the sub-domains is that we take a good amount of traffic from these and Google gives them good ranking for their respective keywords and better rankings than the main domain for their respective keywords. (+ the user seems to like them)
If they are not going to cause issues with Google, do you think it will be ok to leave them as is? or do you think this will cause problems in the future and I'm best of changing them now?
(if i removed these sub-domains i would loose 40%-50% of my overall traffic which is around 6,000+  a day, this would hurt my pride and probably my bank balance!)

Thanks for your opinions, they are greatly welcomed!!!

best Regards
Eddy

Hello All

I'm hoping for some opinions as i am confused as to the best action for me to take.

The problem:
Although i say the below, we have never been penalised by Google, not taken part in any bad link building and don't do too bad with SERP. but i worry Google may not like what i do these days.

We have one main site that is broken down into areas/cities (i,e London, Manchester, etc) so the domain looks like www.domain.co.uk/London

But in addition to this we also use Sub-domains to target popular areas (i,e. http://London.domain.co.uk). 
These sub-domains take the content from the main site but of course only display results relevant to London and are optimised for "London + Keyword" 
Any page that gets duplicated (i.e London.domain.co.uk/profile123 and www.domain.co.uk/profile123 are ALMOST the same content) we add a rel="canonical" link that points to the main domain+page on www.
All these sites have a large amount of links back to www.domain.co.uk/?Page so the user can also search in other areas other then London, etc.

This method has worked well for us and is popular with both users and Google search results. All sites/sub-domains are added to GWT under the same account and all sites have unique sitemaps.

I do however worry that Google may class this as link manipulation owing to the amount of links pointing back to the main domain and its pages (this is not the reason we use the sub-domains though)

In addition to the above sub-domains we have a few domain names (5/6) that are keyword rich that we also place the same content on (i,e www.manchester-keyword.co.uk would show only content relevant to Manchester), and again these sites have links back to the main domain, so users can navigate other areas of the UK.

I worry that these additional domains may also not be liked by Google

What do people think?

I have started to reduce/replace some of the additional keyword rich domains with sub-domains from the main site and then 301 the keyword rich domain (i.e. www.manchester-Keyword.co.uk now goes to http://Manchester.domain.co.uk) as i feel sub-domains may not be penalised as much as unique domains are.
There are domains that i dont really want to 301 as they bring in good amounts of traffic and users have bookmarked them, etc.

Any opinions or what you think i should do would be great, as i really worry that if Google stops giving us good results, i'm in real trouble. Although im not sure if what we do is wrong with Google or not.

What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ).

I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals

Thanks

Jon

Ok i will see what can be done about the duplicate content.

Will adding META NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW to the empty directory pages i have, cure any problems that Google may have? (will NOINDEX also stop these pages from showing as duplicate content in SEOmoz, or will they still be shown?)

I have also spotted that several of the duplicate pages are due to www and non-www
So i have updates the settings in Google WebMaster Tools to only list www and also added a .htaccess 301 redirect so all users are directed to www. 
Is this the best thing to do?

Thanks
Jon

Im looking for a little advice.

My website has always done rather well on the search engines, although it have never ranked well for my top keywords on my main site as they are very competitive, although it does rank for lots of obscure keywords that contain my top keywords or my top keywords + City/Ares. We have over 1,600 pages on the main site most with unique content on, which is what i attribute to why we rank well for the obscure keywords. Content also changes daily on several main pages.

Recently we have made some updates to the usability of the site which our users are liking (page views are up by 100%, time on site us up, bounce rate is down by 50%!).
However it looks like Google did not like the updates....... and has started to send us less visitors (down by around 25%, across several sites. the sites i did not update (kind of like my control) have been unaffected!).

We went through the Panda and Penguin updates unaffected (visitors actually went up!).

So i have joined SEOmoz (and loving it, just like McDonald's). I am now going trough all my sites and making changes to hopefully improve things above and beyond what we used to do.

However out of the 1,600 pages, 386 are being flagged as duplicate content (within my own site), most/half of this is down to; We are a directory type site split into all major cities in the UK.
Cities that don't have listings on, or cities that have the same/similar listing on (as our users provide services to several cities) are been flagged as duplicate content.
Some of the duplicate content is due to dynamic pages that i can correct (i.e out.php?***** i will noindex these pages if thats the best way?)

What i would like to know is; Is this duplicate content flags going to be causing me problems, keeping in mind that the Penguin update did not seem to affect us. If so what advise would people here offer?
I can not redirect the pages, as they are for individual cities (and are also dynamic = only one physical page but using URL rewriting). I can however remove links to cities with no listings, although Google already have these pages listed, so i doubt removing the links from my pages and site map will affect this.

I am not sure if i can post my URL's here as the sites do have adult content on, although is not porn (we are an Escort Guide/Directory, with some partial nudity).

I would love to hear opinions

Thank you very much, it is working in Site Explorer now but not in Competitive Link Analysis, it still says everything is 0.

if it does not update within the next few hours i will contact support.

Thanks again!

it is only showing HTML for me mate!

no images, no css

I do feel for you.
I have had Google do similar to me before, but it usually changes back within a day.

Hope you sort it

I am new to this site, but i would have done the same of a 301 redirect.

However can you not use both https and http? and then drop one once the search engines are listing both? (im not sure if they will see this as duplicate content or not though, if not just run with both http and https)

not sure if you know this or not but, within your HTML links you can use just "//www.domain.com" as appose to "http://www.domain.com". the links will then work on both http and https

Hope this helps, or someone better will come along

from a HTML point of view i think you should never use "&", it should always be "&".

I have just added one of my sub-domains and this shows data.....

When i added my main site as a campaign i got an error message saying that my site redirects to SEOmoz.org, which of course it does not, so i selected to ignore and continue. Would this be anything to do with it?

Thank you very much for your reply

No, my site has been up for 3 years and is well indexed by Google/yahoo/Bing/etc.

We don't do too bad for visitors/page views (around 12,000 a day)
we have concentrated on good content to get us visitors, but i now feel it is time to use something like SEOmoz to get us better listing.

Also when i am looking at the "Competitive Link Analysis" my site has a score of 0 for everything, is this right? as i have external links and of course have internal links, shouldn't these at lest not show as 0?

SEOmoz looks really useful, but it would be better for me if all figures didn't show as 0 or no data

Hi All

I have just joined on the trial offer, im not sure if i can afford the monthly payments, but im hoping SEOmoz will show me that i also cannot afford to be without it!

In my proses of learning this site and flicking through each section to see what things do. However when i enter my URL into Site Explorer i get the following message

"No Data Available for this URL"

My site should be crawl-able, so how do i get to see data for my site/s.

I wont post my URL here, as the site has a slightly adult theme.
If anyone could confirm if i can post "slightly adult" sites.

Best Regards
Jon