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.
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
-
Hi,
I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txtShould the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts?
Thanks!
-
Yeah, internally, "nofollow" still dilutes PageRank, so it doesn't really have a big impact. Practically speaking, I don't think there would be much difference. The links have a customer-facing purposes, I assume, and you just don't want the end result indexed. That should be fine. The only advantage to nofollow might be that it would waste a little less crawl bandwidth (instead of bots visiting the page and then seeing it's blocked, they wouldn't bother). I've tried it both ways in the past (after Google changed the PR-sculpting rules), and could never really measure much difference.
-
Thanks for your reply.
An article I read recently suggested that using nofollow on links on the same website may not be a good idea as "if the website doesn't trust its own pages by having a nofollow, then why would Google want to put trust in it." Does this make sense? Would a subdomain be considered as a completely different site?
My other concern is using nofollow extensively may raise a flag to Google as a site that is heavily seo optimized or tries to manipulate its linking strategy.
Any more thoughts? The website is done 100% for users. All I am looking for is the best practice to follow to maximize the seo efforts in this area.
-
"diluting your authority by having dofollow links" I thought it was not possible to link sclupt in this way, I'm I missing something?
My understanding is that all no follow does is not pass authority and does not help retain authority ( basicly it just throws it out the window the authority it would have passed to that link)
-
There is no point diluting your authority by having dofollow links to the subdomain if it isn't going to rank, so by all means "nofollow" the links.
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
-
Subdomain cannibalization
Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Shop: shop.example.com
Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW
Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> Is the tag above the same as: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0