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.
Using subdomains for related landing pages?
-
Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice... I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).
-
Thanks very much Jane! I think subdirectories are how I'll go.
Effective; organic SEO is HUGE for my initial online success. We market only with direct mail so far. But mailing lists don't address human situations ie: people who've inherited a property AND with it a 2nd mortgage payment AND they're stressed because they can't afford the 2nd payment AND their realtor hasn't sold the inherited property.One last question for all-
With effective landing page SEO & SERP being my primary goal; is the web URL structure term "siloing" familiar to anyone and applicable / adaptable to my multiple landing pages? (I found the term & explanation here: http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htm) Or is some other method more advisible in order to "pool" my subdirectories for better SEO in SERP? Peter
-
Hi Peter,
In some ways, subdirectories seems even more sensible when you're dealing with single landing pages, as they'll work together somewhat to look like a fuller site from Google's perspective, rather than just a collection of subdomains happening to exist on the same domain.
-
Hello again; after looking at your feedback; then a fresh look at our marketing needs & budget... After viewing each of our competitors sites with keyword 'semi'-stuffing, empty tags, horrible SEO structure, very light traffic & way too much info.... So now we're thinking that we do not need a main site; AND JUST HAVE multiple landing pages each very focused on a single financial or situational motivation causing a property owner to want to sell quickly & we'll explain how we are an alternative than a realtor. Does using subdirectories still seem best for only having single page landing pages? Does anyone have a few informative links regarding setting up & use of subdirectories? Thx, Peter
-
Hi Peter,
I understand that the platform only allows for subdomains. From a purely SEO point of view, subfolders or pages are preferable to subdomains because authority does not appear to pass between a parent domain and its subdomains in the same way as it does between subfolders and parent domains. If your landing page sites are only one pagers, they may be seen as quite thin as well.
However, there is no reason why you can't build quality content like this - it just may take more link building to establish the authority for the subdomains than it would for pages on the same site. You will need to ensure that as much unique content as possible is placed on the landing pages to increase their 'worth' in Google's eyes, given that they are separate from each other on subdomains.
-
Thanks for both responses. Alan- These landing pages would be single page sites. Thompson Paul- The reason I thought sub-domains IS TO SAVE $ with Lander ($ per # domains) and the cost of registering many domains.
Here's the specifics of my search.. The targeted property owner mailing lists are based on data: mortgage, taxes & assessors. They give NO CLUES as to human condition that we look for when our mailers get responses.We have a list of motivations (or reasons for distress to sell their house) are financial or circumstantial: divorce, inheritance, job loss, job transfer, can't sell house, bankrupt, tenant trashed apartment, etc. These motivations are not apparent, obviously, on a mailing list. We want to learn the best way to specifically find people, who own their property in CT, who aren't searching to sell - but are looking for solution to divorce or whatever NOT realizing a cash buyer (us) is a real & UPRIGHT solution. ** We have a list of motivations that we want to define into what phrases people ask in Google to find answers; then what keywords get found for those queries.. and limit it the best we can to CT.** Thanks, Peter
PS:Like Squarespace is drag and drop creation for websites plus hosting, ecommerce & stats; so is www.landerapp.com to landing pages -- they offer customize-able templates that are SEO optimize-able, have great stats & offer drag & drop opt-in forms to integrate into my email service. Comments/advice?
-
Fully agree with Alan - subdomains would be a major waste of effort and SEO value.
Are you thinking you want subdomains perhaps so you can track them differently? There are many ways to do the necessary tracking with pages in subdirectories of the main site, so it's not necessary to use subdomains for this reason either.
Unless there's something missing in what you need here, integrating the landing pages into the main site is the vastly superior solution here.
Can you give us an idea what it is about subdomains that you feel you need?
Paul
-
Unless those subdomains for single page sites, may look spammy to google. you can put those pages in your own site, there is nothing to gain using subdomains
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
-
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Partner Login as subdomain?
Hi MozTeam, We have a website that is used as our partner login for our Partners to see their stats, but it is located on a SEPARATE domain from our main corporate website. We currently have thousands of people logging into the external portal every month, which we are obviously not getting good SEO credit for. I am considering bringing the entire login portal into our main corporate website, so that Google sees how popular and useful our site becomes when thousands more people are visiting... We only get a few thousands organic visits to the corporate site per month and about 3x that to the partner login portal. This is why I originally thought we could benefit from bringing it into our corporate site. Challaneges: our website is in .asp but we are launching a new version of it next month, switching it to Wordpress and into .php....but the current partner login website is still in .asp! Questions: 1. How will bringing this site into the main corporate site benefit us as far as SEO? 2. What is the proper way to combine an .asp site with a .php site? 3. If we have to use an iFrame because we can't mix the two languages, will that affect our SEO benefit? Pls advise, as if this is actually a good idea, I'd like to get it launched along with the site redesign that is currently under way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DerekM880 -
All page files in root? Or to use directories?
We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /. For example: /aosta-valley-i6816.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html We are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories. For example, the above URLs would be the following: /images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html Would we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes? Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy? Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory: /images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/ If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/ Just looking for some clarity to our problem! Thank you for your help guys!0