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.
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
-
Hello,
I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains.
We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org.
As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these?
I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore.
Many thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for replying Will.
You have mentioned a few ways to deal with this there - and they all seem to point out to the fact that this should not really be a high-priority issue for us at the moment. Especially, if you think that sub-domains do not really have a major effect to the main site (I would not even think it's even worth us deindexing to be honest as it may be relevant to some people and we can just allow Google to continue indexing as it is).
Surely, all considerations point to this: we can come to the conclusion that we won't be doing any SEO-related work on these pages.
Therefore, how do I set up MOZ to ignore these two sub-domains and only show crawl errors related to the main site? We just don't want these pages to be crawled at all by MOZ given we won't do any work on them.
Thanks
-
Hi there. Sorry for the slow follow-up on this - there was an issue that meant I didn't get the email alert when it was assigned to me.
There is increasing evidence that culling old / poor performing content from your site can have a positive effect, though I wouldn't be particularly confident that this would transfer across sub-domains to benefit the main site.
In general, I suspect that most effort expended here will be better-placed elsewhere, and so I would angle towards the least effort option.
I think that the "rightest" long-term answer though would be to move the best content to the main domain (with accompanying 301 redirects) and remove the remainder with 410 status codes. This should enable you to focus on the most valuable content and get the most benefit from the stuff that is valuable, while avoiding having to continue expending effort on the stuff that is no longer useful. The harder this is, though, the less I'd be inclined to do it - and would be more likely to consider just deindexing the lowest quality stuff and getting whatever benefit remains from the better content for as long as it is a net positive, with an eye to eventually removing it all.
Hope that helps - I don't think it's a super clear-cut situation unfortunately.
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
-
Should I Report A SEO Agency to Google
Our competitor has employed the services of a spammy SEO agency that sends spammy links to our site. Though our rankings were affected we have taken the necessary steps. It is possible to send evidence to Google so that they can take down the site. I want to take this action so that other sites will not be affected by them again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Halmblogmusic0 -
Sitelinks Search Box impact for SEO
I am wondering how the relatively new sitelinks search box impacts the SEO rankings for a specific site or keyword combination - do you guys have any experience or bechmarks on this? Obviously it should help on getting more real estate on the SERP page (due to adding the search box), but do you also get extra goodwill and improved SERP position from adding it? Also, is the impact different on different type of terms, let's say single brand or category term such as "Bestbuy" (or "coupon") or a combination term "Bestbuy Apple" (or "Dixons coupon")? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjr0 -
Bad for SEO to have two very similar websites on the same server?
Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
How to transfer posts from a specific category into a subdomain
Hi Guys, Is there a way in Wordpress to transfer or redirect a category and all posts under it into a sub-domain? Thanks in advance..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Trigun0